The Kings
of Holland and Sweden made a pilgrimage to the new
Mecca of royalism and order at Berlin, and Belgium was
compelled to alter her penal code, because Germany did
not think it adequate to deal with Ultramontanes or
Radical journalists.
of Holland and Sweden made a pilgrimage to the new
Mecca of royalism and order at Berlin, and Belgium was
compelled to alter her penal code, because Germany did
not think it adequate to deal with Ultramontanes or
Radical journalists.
Robertson - Bismarck
There was room for Bennig-
sen in the King's Council, but not for Forckenbeck, or
Stauffenberg or any one else. Bennigsen then refused
for himself and the others. When the Emperor, inspired
by the Conservatives and soldiers, angrily remonstrated
against this trafficking with Liberalism behind his Imperial
and Prussian back, Bismarck was able to assure him, with
perfect truth, that the last thing he desired was to ask his
Majesty to confer office on National Liberals. Bismarck
had hoped to split the Liberals by detaching Bennigsen and
the right of the party. Bennigsen desired to introduce
Parliamentary government--'a ministry a la Gladstone,'
which as in Great Britain would be representative of the
strongest party in the Legislature and make the policy of
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BISMARCK
the future. The negotiation, however, was a complete
failure. But while Bennigsen did not get office, Bismarck
gave the coup de gr&ce to the last effort to introduce the
system of responsible party government into the govern-
ment of the Empire. It only remained now to crush the
National Liberals.
It is commonly said that the Bismarckian policy in the
Kulturkampf ended in a complete defeat--proved by the
recantation of the next ten years. Three comments, how-
ever, are essential in this connection. First, the Liberal
parties which passed and upheld ' the May Laws ' and the
principles underlying them never recanted nor repented.
On the contrary, they opposed and lamented, with good
reason, the Chancellor's surrender. Secondly, the Vatican
in 1878 was as tired of the struggle as Bismarck. It had not
been defeated, but it had failed so far to secure amendment,
much less the repeal, of ' the May Laws. ' By 1878 the
danger of serious schism within the Roman Communion
had vanished. Ninety-nine Catholics out of a hundred
accepted the Vatican Decrees, but the Roman Church in
Germany was crippled by the Falk code. Had the
National Liberals come into office, determined to fight
to a finish, the Vatican would not have had an alliance to
sell which gave it so commanding a position in the nego-
tiations that followed the death of Pio Nono and the ac-
cession of Leo xii1. There is every reason to suppose that
a strong National Liberal ministry could have continued
the struggle and imposed a very different compromise to
that dictated from Rome and accepted by Bismarck.
Thirdly, Bismarck deliberately sacrificed victory in the
Kulturkampf to victory in other issues, more important
in his judgment. What those issues were the next twelve
years revealed (see p. 451). The turning-point in the
making of Imperial Germany was reached in 1878. The
Germany of 1890 was essentially the product of Bismarck's
policy in these twelve years imposed on the results pre-
viously achieved. But Bismarck was able to evade the
Liberal ultimatum and accomplish the vital transition to
the new era, only because the Reichstag was not a govern-
ment-making, policy-making organ. The adroitness and
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
intuition with which he created opportunities and
utilised those provided by fate or fortune are very
remarkable. The years 1878 and 1879 are essentially
years, within Germany and without it, of 'the Bis-
marck touch. '
When the Chancellor returned to the Wilhelmstrasse
in the spring of 1878 his first business was to deal
with the Eastern Question and to preside at the Congress
of Berlin.
? 3. Foreign Policy, 1871-1879
The student of Bismarck's foreign policy after 1870 is
perpetually confronted with the difficulty of ascertaining
the truth. Sybel down to 1868 was permitted to use
freely the Prussian archives, and his classical history, The
Foundation of the German Empire, is written from original
official sources and enriched by precious quotations, not
available in other authorities. But for the period after
1868 Sybel found the . archives closed. He was not suffi-
ciently impressed with the duty of writing the history of
Germany as a chronicle of Hohenzollern omniscience.
Bismarck was lavish of explanations in the Reichstag, and
in documents intended for publication, but the gaps are
more conspicuous than the inclusions, nor do the ex-
planations offered always tally in substance and fact. It
is true that from British, French, Russian, and Austrian
sources much new light has been shed on dark places, but
the conclusion remains that the interpretation of many
critical episodes rests on inferences from acts and events,
with such other help as can be pieced together from stray
sources. It is significant that Stosch's Memoirs stop at
1872, and that, critically tested, Hohenlohe's Memoirs ob-
viously contain many excisions. The furious controversy
over the Crown Prince's Diary, published by Geffcken, is
illuminated by Bismarck's Immediate Report, the object
of which was to deny its accuracy, combined with a virtual
admission of its authenticity and a denunciation of the
crime of publishing truth so damaging to the official version
of the origin of the Empire. Bismarck's revelation in 1896
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BISMARCK
of the Re-insurance Treaty and its non-renewal terrified
the Foreign Office. There were, obviously, a great many
more skeletons in the cupboard, the key of which was kept
by the relentless old man; or, as Bismarck expressed it to
Treitschke, ' you will not find our linen as clean as could
be wished. ' The official version of foreign policy for the
public, and above all the German public, was framed in the
interest of the dynasty and the government--as was its
military history with all its parade of information by the
General Staff. Such a publication as the French Origines
de la guerre de 1870, dating back to 1863 with its complete
set of documents, critically edited and annotated, has
never been, and probably never will be, attempted by the
Prussian authorities. Indeed, the closer one works on
German foreign policy after 1871 the more certain is the
conclusion that German official statements cannot be
accepted as substantially true without independent corro-
borative evidence. And this is particularly the case with
Bismarck himself.
Bismarck's conception of diplomacy was singularly like
that of Metternich. Foreign policy should be handled as
a confidential and personal transaction of State affairs by
plenipotentiaries, able to bind their governments. Oral
discussions permitted great freedom of intercourse, and a
no less unfettered freedom of repudiation. The nego-
tiations with Napoleon in. between i860 and 1866 were
models of Bismarckian methods. Similarly, after 1870 his
dealings with Russia rested largely on personal engage-
ments to, or from, Alexander 11. and Alexander 1n. Hence
his preference for autocracies; business could be done
with the autocrat, or, as in his own case, with the minister
who had the autocrat well in hand. The continuity of the
individual was more important than the continuity of the
policy. Hence, also, his dislike of France after 1871.
French statesmen came and went like partners at a ball,
and the promise of the first might be good reason for in-
fidelity in the next. Hence still more his dislike of Great
Britain and the British system of publicity and ministerial
responsibility: the more so because, unlike France,
German threats could not cause the fall of a Gladstone or
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 329
a Beaconsfield, a Granville or a Salisbury. 1 Above all, he
detested with a fierce detestation the British Blue-Book 2
which brought government into the arena of public debate
and enlightened the public not with acts, which was all
that the public was entitled to know, but with methods,
which it was certain to misunderstand. Bismarck's
hatred of the British Blue-Book was a blend of the
patrician superstition that foreign policy was a mystery
only to be mastered by the privileged class with a heredi-
tary aptitude for its ritual--a superstition that still obsesses
the well-bred Levites of the cosmopolitan priesthood of
diplomacy--resentment at any government daring to do
anything without his permission, and the fear that if the
blinds of the temple were perpetually drawn up the plain
man would condemn the result because the methods were
so peculiar. Bismarck knew well that the diplomacy which
annexed Schleswig-Holstein, which prepared the war of
1866, which laid the long mine of the Hohenzollern candi-
dature and the 'defensive' war of 1870, and the revision
of the Treaty of 1856 did not cease with the Treaty of
Frankfurt. Peace and those who ensue it have their
victories of lies, stratagems, plots, and counter-plots no
less than have war and the soldiers.
Peace after 1871 was the supreme need for the Empire.
Germany was now a 'satiated' country. The 'injuries
of time ' had been obliterated at last, and Germany, having
obtained by war the conditions on which she desired to
live with her neighbours, now wished for no more than the
maintenance of those conditions, and their development
into a permanent system. It was inevitable that mutilated
and humiliated France should dream of the day when the
Treaty of Frankfurt would be revised--by a successful war
1 Not that Bismarck did not attempt in Great Britain this particularly
German method of controlling policy. There is clear evidence that Bismarck
between 1880 and 1885 tried to get both Lord Derby and Lord Granville dis-
missed, and their places taken by ministers more amenable to German
dictation. The dismissal of Delcasse in 1905 was the Bismarckian stroke by
Bismarck's disciples.
* 'It is astonishing,' wrote Odo Russell to Granville,' how cordially Bismarck
hates our Blue Books. . . . If he once takes offence at anything we publish, he
wiH take his revenge by making himself as disagreeable as possible for the rest
of his days. '--{Life of Granville, ii. p. 367. )
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? 330
BISMARCK
of revenge--but the France of 1871 single-handed could
never accomplish that. A France without allies was a
France condemned to accept 1871 as the last word in the
great struggle for the Rhine. The task therefore was to
keep France isolated. The surest way of accomplishing
this was the organisation of Central Europe with the rest
of the States in subordination to the new German Empire.
The isolation of France and the German hegemony of the
Continent were complementary aspects of the same
problem and were complementary results of a single
aim.
Bismarck set to work after 1871 to convince the leading
continental States that it was their interest to accept the
facts of 1871 and keep France isolated. The revival of the
Triple Alliance of the three monarchies of Russia, Austria,
and Imperial Prussia was the first step. 'There is always
a chancellor in Europe,' says M. de Mazade in his illumi-
nating study of Metternich. The difference between the
system of Metternich and that of Bismarck lay in the
transfer of the centre of gravity from Vienna to Berlin.
But that was vital.
The material interests of the Empire, deduced from a
system of political ideas maintained by Germany, with the
nation in arms, as the guardian of both--such was the core
of the Chancellor's system. Prestige in diplomacy also
was a weapon of incalculable strength in Bismarck's hands.
Prussian prestige after 1871 rested on two clearly defined
and intelligible elements--a man and a nation's power.
In 1862 the European chancelleries had felt like the Prus-
sian officers before Jena. 'Your majesty,' they assured
Frederick William in. , 'has several generals superior to
M. de Bonaparte. ' In 1871 they felt what Goethe said of
Napoleon 1. 'You cannot beat him, the man is too
strong for you. ' Personal intercourse with the man
heightened the hypnotism that Bismarck exercised.
His personal diplomacy was a marvellous mixture of
brutality, arrogance, and geniality, of patrician grandeur
aided by the tricks of the card-sharper. A stab in the
back came as easily from his vindictive rancour, as the great
stroke that achieved a long-matured ideal. He might
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
pretend to forget, but he could not forgive, and never
pretended that he did.
The invincibility of Prussia, scientifically organised, so
that her strength could be concentrated on a policy
directed by an unflinching fidelity to a single purpose--
on that assumption he had taken office in 1862, and that
assumption after 1871 he taught Europe to regard as the
first and last axiom of the State system of the Continent.
The power of Germany, a Germany perpetually mobilised
and ready to spring at a word from the Wilhelmstrasse,
was burnt into the mind of Europe, and the German
Foreign Office acted on the assumption in every trans-
action, great or small. 'Germany,' said Moltke in the
Reichstag in 1875, 'must remain armed to the teeth for
fifty years, in order to keep what took her six months to
win. ' The world studied and copied the Prussian army.
Even at our Horse Guards the British military' demi-gods'
began dimly to realise that the conduct of war required
educated brains, and could not be acquired on the parade
ground in the morning and the hunting or cricket-field
in the afternoon. Moltke, however, was determined that
for all the slavish copying of Prussian technique by
Prussia's rivals, the real secret, 'the secret of the higher
command ' should remain an inviolable Prussian monopoly.
Other nations would produce soldiers, but Germany alone
would continue to educate generals. And Bismarck in the
Reichskanzlerpalais had the same determination. The
secret of the higher command in policy, won by the blood
and sweat of a lifetime, must be kept by the same blood and
sweat. If Germany once allowed the quality of that right
judgment in all things on which her prestige in diplomacy
was built to deteriorate, disaster would follow. No
material strength could compensate for an inferiority in
the higher direction.
The confidence of Germany in the Chancellor as the
director of foreign policy and the guardian of Germany's
place in Europe was implicit. The bitter criticism poured
on the successive phases of his home policy scarcely trickled
into the sphere of foreign affairs. Gone were the days of
1862 and 1863, when professors and pathologists, publicists
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? 33*
BISMARCK
and pamphleteers, arraigned before an audience half-
convinced in advance, the foreign policy of the Minister-
President. The Reichstag listened and obeyed, at the
feet of the Master. Bismarck studied and gave great
weight to the volume of public opinion, as his handling of
the colonial question subsequently showed. His speeches
on the delicate problems of international relations were
invariably stamped with the magisterial note, the recog-
nition of the nation's demand for power, and the subtle
personal appeal for confidence. 'Bismarck has,' said Lord
Odo Russell, 'a prophetic coup HceiV He wove into his
analysis autobiographic reminiscences and tantalising
glimpses of the forces moving behind the scene; and the
vanity and egoism with which they were flavoured reflected
the vanity and egoism of the audience. The German
Reichstag was on these occasions, and it knew it, the
Olympus from which Jove spoke to Europe. He made
Germany feel its unity and grandeur. Such speeches,
with their exposition of the realities, were a tonic and an
inspiration. No German but drew deeper lungs after
hearing these utterances of pontifical infallibility from the
tribune of the Reichstag; the speaker himself--that
gigantic figure of the Chancellor, the civil Prime Minister
of the Empire, in a military uniform with his sword at his
side, the nonlike head, the flashing eyes, the gesture of
command, even the hoarse, rasping, and hesitating voice
that made the barbed phrase or the felicitous apophthegm
more telling--the speaker himself was an arresting in-
carnation of Imperial power and of Prussian militarism.
In reviving the triple entente of the Central and Eastern
monarchies Bismarck securely reckoned on the ill-will of
Russia to Great Britain, so patent in the Washington
negotiations and the Genevan arbitration, and the genuine
fear of Liberal and Radical tendencies in France and
Great Britain. 'The downward course' of England
alarmed Alexander n. , who forgot that England had been
going to perdition since 1815, and that some countries
can even wax strong and prosperous on such perdition,
and can be a far safer home for monarchs than the hearth
of order at Petersburg. 'The sacred cause of Royalty' was
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
declared to be imperilled; 'Germany, Austria, and Russia
should hold together to resist those dangerous and evil influ-
ences of England, if order was to be maintained in Europe. '
Dynasticism and order were to be pitted against republican-
ism and the revolution. The solidarity of European Con-
servatism--the familiar catchword took Bismarck back
to the age of Metternich in which he had grown up, and
the school of Gerlach that now proclaimed him a rene-
gade. Toujours ca change, toujours c'est la meme chose.
Bismarck now exploited the shibboleths of the dynasties to
rivet the Bismarckian conception of Central Europe on
Vienna and Petersburg, as he had exploited the shibboleths
of Gerlach to rivet Prussian supremacy on Germany. The
sovereigns met in 1871 at Gastein and Salzburg--which
was ' the coffin' of Beust, about to be dismissed and re-
placed by Andrassy--and in 1872 at Berlin, exchanged
kisses on both cheeks and showered decorations. Bismarck
entertained the royalties and their staffs with diplomatic
reminiscences; he was particularly pleased to dilate on the
tortures suffered by the French negotiators (1870-1), and
explained with genial humour how he had baited the hooks
to play with the fish before landing it. The Emperor
William returned the visits at Petersburg and Vienna.
Koniggratz was forgotten; the reconciliation prepared
by the peace of 1866 proceeded rapidly. 'No formal
treaty was concluded,' the Crown Prince wrote to his
cousin the ruler of Roumania, but the understanding was
intimate and complete. In 1873 Victor Emmanuel also
came to Berlin. His readiness to join Napoleon in 1870
was forgiven and forgotten by his accession to the monar-
chical entente. Bismarck had secured the vulnerable flank
of Germany in the east; he had withdrawn the consti-
tutional kingdom of Italy from gravitating towards the
sister Latin race; France was without an ally.
The Kings
of Holland and Sweden made a pilgrimage to the new
Mecca of royalism and order at Berlin, and Belgium was
compelled to alter her penal code, because Germany did
not think it adequate to deal with Ultramontanes or
Radical journalists. Beyond the Carpathians and in the
valley of the lower Danube stood the Hohenzollern
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? 334
BISMARCK
sentinel on guard. The intimate relations between
Bucharest and Berlin, between the Hohenzollern cadet
and the great Hohenzollern Emperor, are written in every
line of the diary of Charles of Roumania. 1 The pacific
penetration of Europe by a Germany, matchless in arms
and science, had begun.
All went as happily as marriage bells, all except the
course of events in the accursed France. Until 1873
France patiently explored the causes of her collapse, and
heroically wrestled with the German indemnity and the
re-making of her army. Thiers, by the Treaty of
March 15, which ended the German occupation, earned
the proud title of ' Liberator of the soil of the patrie,' and
the Monarchical Right promptly rewarded him by hurling
him from power (May 24). Bismarck viewed with pro-
found resentment the recovery of 'the hereditary foe. '
The military and financial convalescence was being speeded
up beyond all anticipation. The restoration of a Catholic
Bourbon royalty, whose legitimacy and lineage dated to an
age when the mushroom monarchism of the Hohenzollerns
had not yet sprouted in the sandy wastes of Brandenburg,
might bring France back into the sacred circle of dynasti-
cism, even become the centre of a Catholic coalition against
Prussia. The Kulturkampf raged in Germany. What if
'Henry v. ,' the 'emigrb of Frohsdorf, proved to be the
'stone' that Pio Nono proclaimed in his visions would
'issue from heaven and break the Colossus'? Mit
der Dummheit kdmpfen Cotter selbst vergebens--one of
Bismarck's favourite quotations--'Against stupidity even
the gods fight in vain. ' 'Henry v. ,' like our 'James in.
and vii1. ' was not of the stuff to recover crowns lost by the
folly of his ancestors. Bismarck's luck did not desert him.
'Henry v. ' refused to make the great renunciation: an
assegai in the South African bush killed the Prince Imperial
(1879); Gambetta died from a poisoned hand in his
forty-fourth year (1882); Skobeleff, who never could
1 'I am here alone,' wrote Prince Charles of Roumania in 1871 to King
William, << a solitary outpost, the sentinel of the frontier against the East . . .
but I am neither so distant nor so wearied but that I can heartily join in the
acclamations for the German Emperor. '
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 335
decide which he desired the more passionately--to lead
the Cossacks into Delhi or into Berlin--died in 1882; and
Harry Arnim, who foretold the Kulturkampf from Rome
in 1869--brilliant, unstable, and cursed with an ambition
and the absence of all the qualities required to achieve it--
was broken and hunted into exile. His place at the
German Embassy in Paris was taken by Prince Hohenlohe,
whose Memoirs reveal how odious to a refined gentleman
was the task of hectoring and bullying France, laid upon
him from the Wilhelmstrasse.
'A republic,' Bismarck decided, 'would find it more
difficult to obtain allies than a monarchy. ' German
diplomacy therefore supported the republicans, while also
aiding every party that would embarrass the republic.
In the republican solution Bismarck saw a Nessus shirt for
France: French Jacobinism clinched the argument pressed
by the royal physicians of Law and Order for keeping the
moral leper in a sanitary isolation.
The war scares of 1874 and l%75 are still an obscure
episode. The argument of German historians and
Bismarck hagiographers that Bismarck did not believe in
'preventive' wars, because he said so in two or three
obscure and probably insincere sentences, is as childish
as Bismarck's own explanation that it was a Stock Exchange
manoeuvre, inflated by the Chauvinism of the General
Staff, the chief of which, Moltke, was a 'street Arab
(gamin) in politics,' and utilised by the vanity of Gort-
schakov to score an empty diplomatic triumph. Moltke
was not a gamin in politics, and Gortschakovs do not win
triumphs over a Bismarck if they have only vanity at their
command. Considering what France had suffered she
was perfectly entitled to make her army as strong as she
could, and in doing so, she only acted on Bismarckian
principles. The Foreign and War Offices in Berlin knew
that a France with a strong army would be an ally worth
having--at Petersburg, for example. The one black fear
that haunted Bismarck--it dated back to 1854--was an
alliance between France and Russia, in which Germany
could not be a third and wrecking partner. Such an
alliance meant the restoration of the Continental Balance
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? 336
BISMARCK
of Power which it had been the work of 1866 and 1871 to
destroy. It could be frustrated at the outset by threaten-
ing France with war--compelling her to suspend her re-
organisation and driving her back on the impotence of a
second-rate State. In the winter of 1874-5, Bismarck tried
to pick a quarrel with France because the French bishops
had endorsed the papal encyclical condemning the arrest
of Cardinal Ledochowski, and provoked it by a violent and
inspired press campaign on the menace involved in French
armaments. German armaments, of course, were a proof
of Germany's pacific intentions. Moltke--a real god from
a real machine--was brought from his silence in the War
Office to explain to the Reichstag the serious danger in
which Germany stood. And Moltke explained with an
emphatic brevity that sent a shiver down the patriotic
spine of every German.
It is fairly certain that the famous article in the Post--
'Is War in sight ? '--was inspired by Bismarck, and that
the Emperor had not realised the elaborate manoeuvre
going on behind his back. It is quite certain that the facts
communicated to The Times by De Blowitz, primed by the
Duc Decazes (May 4, 1875), the information sent from
Berlin by Lord Odo Russell, by Lord Lyons from Paris,
and by three German Embassies in three capitals, together
with the information on which Alexander n. and Gort-
schakov acted, and on which Queen Victoria wrote her
famous letter to the Emperor William, were substantially
correct. But Alexander came to Berlin, and by May 10
Gortschakov was able to send his telegram ' Now peace is
assured,' and the British government to say publicly that
it had 'supported, as much as seemed necessary, the ex-
hortations which the Emperor of Russia appeared inclined
to make during his visit. '
Bismarck was very angry. The Prussian General Staff
was quite ready to make a dozen preventive wars, but it is
difficult to believe that the Chancellor meant more than
to drive the Duc Decazes from office, and thus compel
France to reduce her armaments, or possibly to coerce her
into indiscretions in which the chassepots would go off of
themselves. The cause of his anger lay much deeper than
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
resentment at a personal and public rebuff at the hands
of Gortschakov. He had been completely outplayed in
the diplomatic game. The Emperor told Prince Hohen-
lohe ' I do not wish war with France . . . but I fear that
Bismarck may drag me into it little by little. ' The warn-
ings to the Kaiser from the sovereigns of Great Britain
and Russia turned Bismarck's flank. He was confronted
with a European coalition, and Decazes, thoroughly terrified
as he was, as indeed were all the statesmen in France,
managed the episode very neatly. He remembered July
1870 and behaved with studied discretion. 'Decazes,'
Bismarck is reported to have said,' is like a ball--if pricked,
he rolls away; nothing goes in. ' Bismarck knew, for he
had been pricking the ball assiduously in the hope that
it would not roll, but burst. An appeal from the French
government to Russia and Great Britain elicited a very
clear pronouncement that a war thrust on France would' be
an iniquity' which Europe would not tolerate. Bismarck
realised that he was not dealing with the Duc de Gramont
or the European situation of July 1870. The leading strings
woven for the Triple Alliance of the monarchs did not
prevent independent Russian or British action. In a
word, the Europe that Thiers had ' failed to find ' in 1870
Bismarck ' found ' by colliding violently with it. Europe
earnestly desired peace, but not a peace based on the per-
manent obliteration of France. The whole episode was
a culmination of the perpetual bullying of France by
Bismarck, based on the assumption that the French
government must arrange its internal policy to German
dictation. Arnim, for example, on one occasion said to
the French Foreign Minister,' Remember, I forbid you to
take Tunis--yes, I forbid you. ' 'Bismarck,' wrote Lord
Odo to Lord Derby, 'is at his old tricks again . . . his
sensational policy is very wearisome. ' Europe had not yet
grasped that a hectoring foreign policy was continuously
employed by the Chancellor to lash up German public
opinion and influence the Reichstag. In 1874-5 the
Kulturkampf was in a critical stage. But, with all allow-
ances, the weight of the evidence confidentially laid before
the Russian and British governments convinced them that
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? 338
BISMARCK
Germany would pick a quarrel, if it could, with the French
Republic.
The eternal Eastern Question placed a far heavier strain
on Bismarck's system, for at once Great Britain, reluctant
in 1875 openly to take the side of France, stepped into the
centre of the European stage. It proved indeed as critical
as the Greek insurrection had been to Metternich's Holy
Alliance from 1822-30. The revolts of Montenegro,
Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, and the intervention of
Russia, followed by the Russo-Turkish War and the Treaty
of San Stefano, brought Europe within measurable distance
of a European conflagration. Bismarck had endeavoured
to meet the danger by the Berlin memorandum (May 11,
1876), which broke down because Great Britain, rightly
or wrongly, refused to be a party to it. National passion
was rising fast. It was Nationalism that had brought the
Russian armies to the gates of Constantinople. Neither
Great Britain nor Austria had forgotten Russian action in
1870, and the British fleet also was at the gates of Con-
stantinople. Austria could not keep out of a war between
Russia and Great Britain--her interest in the Balkans was
too deep. What was Germany to do in that case: side
with Austria or with Russia, or cut the sorry figure she
had cut in 1854? H she sided openly with Austria or
Russia it was certain that France would find an ally at
once in Germany's enemy. In the winter of 1877-8 Bis-
marck saw the foundation of his system crumbling away.
National ambitions were riving asunder the identity of
dynastic interest expressed in the Entente of the Three
Monarchies. At all costs, therefore, the war in the Near
East must be localised and ended, and the European
problem settled not by arms but by diplomacy.
Bismarck returned from Varzin on February 14. The
preliminaries of peace between Turkey and Russia had
been signed on January 31; on February 7 part of the
British fleet had entered the Sea of Marmora and was
within sight of the Russian lines. On January 14 the
British government, supported by Andrassy, demanded
the revision of the Russo-Turkish treatv by the Concert
of Europe. On February 19 Bismarck reviewed the situa-
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 339
tion for the Reichstag--a masterly performance on a very
slack rope. He emphasised the supreme need of peace, the
justifiability of a European revision, and the disinterested-
ness of Germany. He quietly disclaimed all idea of dic-
tating to any of the great Powers; Germany, however,
could perform one humble and efficient task--' that of the
honest broker'--facilitating business between clients at
cross-purposes, all of whom were the broker's friends.
Beneath the speaker's cool analysis surged the deep bass of
German power. It was because she was so strong that
Germany could be so calm. But if she chose to throw
her incomparable army into the scales, it would be decisive.
Russia had no option but to submit. Her ministers,
however, felt that here indeed was Bismarck's gratitude
for aiding the refusal to submit the Treaty of Frankfurt
to a Congress.
The Congress of Berlin under Bismarck's presidency
testified to the primacy of the German Empire in Europe.
In 1856 Prussia had been kindly allowed the vacant chair
in the Congress of Paris. It was now shared between
France and Turkey. The diplomatic salute that in 1856
had been taken by Napoleon in. was in 1878 taken by
Bismarck. 'The honest broker' did not merely act as a
clearing-house and take a small commission. For two
of the clients at least--Austria and Russia--if not for all,
he wrote out the contract notes and settled the article
to be transferred as well as the price. In 1878 the
principle was quietly laid down that the business of
Continental Europe must henceforward go through the
Berlin Exchange in the Wilhelmstrasse, and transactions
concluded without the Berlin official stamp would always
be at the buyer's or seller's peril.
The details of the Congress belong to general European
history and the particular States immediately concerned.
But apart from the registration of Germany's hegemony,
the Congress raises a pertinent and difficult question. At
what precise point did Germany's and Bismarck's direct
interest in the Near East commence? If we were to
believe the Chancellor's public utterances, that direct
interest did not begin until at least a decade later, if then.
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BISMARCK
In 1876 (December 7, 1876) he pronounced, in a pictur-
esque phrase, that to Germany the Near East was not
worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier, and he con-
tinued to repeat the disclaimer with a monotony and an
emphasis that convey the quintessence of suspiciousness.
It is, however, not necessary to pick the locks of the
German and Turkish archives to prove that for some
years prior to 1878 German diplomacy had been working
with stealthy and steady persistence at displacing British,
Russian, and French influence with the Sublime Porte, and
quietly substituting a German replica of' the great Eltchi,'
Stratford de Redclyffe, as the most important figure
at Constantinople. By 1878 Turkey had been already
taught to recognise that while Russia was an irrecon-
cilable enemy, Austria at best a very interested friend, and
Great Britain a useless ally or an open foe, Germany would
be ready to preserve the integrity of the Ottoman Empire,
in return for political and commercial control. Such a
control was an essential corollary to a secure Central
Empire, and was perfectly compatible with an ultimate
Austrian advance to Salonica. The argument and the
opportunity were immensely heightened by the sequel
to the Berlin Congress--the blunders, in particular, of
Russian policy in the treatment of Roumania and Bulgaria.
But it is demonstrable that the subsequent and growing
resistance of the Ottoman Empire to the Concert of
Europe rested on German support which did not begin in
1879. The success of the European Concert at Berlin in
averting war, and its failure in assigning the Balkans to
the Balkan peoples, were largely due to Bismarck. A
truer perspective has taught us that not ' der alte Jude'
(Beaconsfield) but 'der alte Junker' (Bismarck) was the
great figure at the Congress of Berlin. 1
It is no less true that in 1878 Bismarck primarily en-
1 To-day we can read many reminiscences by those who took part in the
Congress, and many and vivid are the stories related by eye-witnesses of Bismarck.
His temper throughout, we are assured, was ' vile. ' We have the picture of his
fainting, with Gortschakov, who thought he was going to die, offering him a
glass of water, and the Chancellor's reply,' Pas mort, mon cher, pas encore, mon
cher, pas encore! ' or of his striding up and down at a private session and ex-
claiming--' Settle, gentlemen, settle, I insist--to-morrow I go to Varzin. '
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 341
visaged the problem from an Austrian angle. The assign-
ment to Austria of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Sandjak
of Novi Bazar, which opened up the road to the valley of
the Vardar, was certainly the result of a secret agreement
between Austria and Russia, and was probably the result
of a prior agreement between Vienna and Berlin. Tatis-
cheff takes it as proved that as early as 1873 Austria was
to secure such compensation in the Balkan peninsula,
with Germany's approval, as would partially make good
Austrian losses in Germany and Italy. Such a policy was
the logical completion of Bismarck's Central Europe,
based on Austria as a Danubian State, expansion of which
would be south-eastwards. Agreements behind the back of
an ally were part of Bismarck's methods, as the reinsurance
of 1884 and 1887 proved. He was always ready to find com-
pensation in territory that did not belong to Germany for
a State that he had mutilated. The understanding of 1873
was a reinsurance against the entente with Russia of 1872.
A Balkan sphere of control was a sop to the Magyar
ascendency, and since Beust's dismissal in 1871 the recon-
ciliation of Germany and Austria rested on an entente with
Andrassy and the Magyars. Vienna and Buda-Pesth com-
bined could be trusted to stem the tide of Panslavism in the
Balkans and hold the passes until Germany had completed
her diplomatic penetration and decided on her policy.
The international situation was very complicated. But
from his central position at Berlin Bismarck by ceaseless
effort and utilising every turn aimed first at maintaining
the national antagonisms of Russia, Austria, and Great
Britain, which enabled him always to have rival groups
to bargain with; secondly, at continuing the isolation of
France. The European Powers were to be grouped round
Berlin, with Germany as the arbiter of their rivalries.
A study of the evidence available suggests the suspicion1
1 The student can study, for example, the evidence derived from the dispatches
and memoranda in Crispi's Memoirs, vol. ii. ; Lord Newton's Life of Lord Lyons,
Lord Fitzmaurice's Life of Lord GraimiUe, Wertheimer's Life of Andrassy,
Busch's Bismarck, some Secret Pages of his History, Gontaut-Biron's Mon
Ambassade en AUemagne and Dernieres Annies de PAmba. 'sade, the letters of
General Le Flo published in the Figaro (1887), Prince Hohenlohe's Memoirs,
and the unpublished documents cited by M.
sen in the King's Council, but not for Forckenbeck, or
Stauffenberg or any one else. Bennigsen then refused
for himself and the others. When the Emperor, inspired
by the Conservatives and soldiers, angrily remonstrated
against this trafficking with Liberalism behind his Imperial
and Prussian back, Bismarck was able to assure him, with
perfect truth, that the last thing he desired was to ask his
Majesty to confer office on National Liberals. Bismarck
had hoped to split the Liberals by detaching Bennigsen and
the right of the party. Bennigsen desired to introduce
Parliamentary government--'a ministry a la Gladstone,'
which as in Great Britain would be representative of the
strongest party in the Legislature and make the policy of
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BISMARCK
the future. The negotiation, however, was a complete
failure. But while Bennigsen did not get office, Bismarck
gave the coup de gr&ce to the last effort to introduce the
system of responsible party government into the govern-
ment of the Empire. It only remained now to crush the
National Liberals.
It is commonly said that the Bismarckian policy in the
Kulturkampf ended in a complete defeat--proved by the
recantation of the next ten years. Three comments, how-
ever, are essential in this connection. First, the Liberal
parties which passed and upheld ' the May Laws ' and the
principles underlying them never recanted nor repented.
On the contrary, they opposed and lamented, with good
reason, the Chancellor's surrender. Secondly, the Vatican
in 1878 was as tired of the struggle as Bismarck. It had not
been defeated, but it had failed so far to secure amendment,
much less the repeal, of ' the May Laws. ' By 1878 the
danger of serious schism within the Roman Communion
had vanished. Ninety-nine Catholics out of a hundred
accepted the Vatican Decrees, but the Roman Church in
Germany was crippled by the Falk code. Had the
National Liberals come into office, determined to fight
to a finish, the Vatican would not have had an alliance to
sell which gave it so commanding a position in the nego-
tiations that followed the death of Pio Nono and the ac-
cession of Leo xii1. There is every reason to suppose that
a strong National Liberal ministry could have continued
the struggle and imposed a very different compromise to
that dictated from Rome and accepted by Bismarck.
Thirdly, Bismarck deliberately sacrificed victory in the
Kulturkampf to victory in other issues, more important
in his judgment. What those issues were the next twelve
years revealed (see p. 451). The turning-point in the
making of Imperial Germany was reached in 1878. The
Germany of 1890 was essentially the product of Bismarck's
policy in these twelve years imposed on the results pre-
viously achieved. But Bismarck was able to evade the
Liberal ultimatum and accomplish the vital transition to
the new era, only because the Reichstag was not a govern-
ment-making, policy-making organ. The adroitness and
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
intuition with which he created opportunities and
utilised those provided by fate or fortune are very
remarkable. The years 1878 and 1879 are essentially
years, within Germany and without it, of 'the Bis-
marck touch. '
When the Chancellor returned to the Wilhelmstrasse
in the spring of 1878 his first business was to deal
with the Eastern Question and to preside at the Congress
of Berlin.
? 3. Foreign Policy, 1871-1879
The student of Bismarck's foreign policy after 1870 is
perpetually confronted with the difficulty of ascertaining
the truth. Sybel down to 1868 was permitted to use
freely the Prussian archives, and his classical history, The
Foundation of the German Empire, is written from original
official sources and enriched by precious quotations, not
available in other authorities. But for the period after
1868 Sybel found the . archives closed. He was not suffi-
ciently impressed with the duty of writing the history of
Germany as a chronicle of Hohenzollern omniscience.
Bismarck was lavish of explanations in the Reichstag, and
in documents intended for publication, but the gaps are
more conspicuous than the inclusions, nor do the ex-
planations offered always tally in substance and fact. It
is true that from British, French, Russian, and Austrian
sources much new light has been shed on dark places, but
the conclusion remains that the interpretation of many
critical episodes rests on inferences from acts and events,
with such other help as can be pieced together from stray
sources. It is significant that Stosch's Memoirs stop at
1872, and that, critically tested, Hohenlohe's Memoirs ob-
viously contain many excisions. The furious controversy
over the Crown Prince's Diary, published by Geffcken, is
illuminated by Bismarck's Immediate Report, the object
of which was to deny its accuracy, combined with a virtual
admission of its authenticity and a denunciation of the
crime of publishing truth so damaging to the official version
of the origin of the Empire. Bismarck's revelation in 1896
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BISMARCK
of the Re-insurance Treaty and its non-renewal terrified
the Foreign Office. There were, obviously, a great many
more skeletons in the cupboard, the key of which was kept
by the relentless old man; or, as Bismarck expressed it to
Treitschke, ' you will not find our linen as clean as could
be wished. ' The official version of foreign policy for the
public, and above all the German public, was framed in the
interest of the dynasty and the government--as was its
military history with all its parade of information by the
General Staff. Such a publication as the French Origines
de la guerre de 1870, dating back to 1863 with its complete
set of documents, critically edited and annotated, has
never been, and probably never will be, attempted by the
Prussian authorities. Indeed, the closer one works on
German foreign policy after 1871 the more certain is the
conclusion that German official statements cannot be
accepted as substantially true without independent corro-
borative evidence. And this is particularly the case with
Bismarck himself.
Bismarck's conception of diplomacy was singularly like
that of Metternich. Foreign policy should be handled as
a confidential and personal transaction of State affairs by
plenipotentiaries, able to bind their governments. Oral
discussions permitted great freedom of intercourse, and a
no less unfettered freedom of repudiation. The nego-
tiations with Napoleon in. between i860 and 1866 were
models of Bismarckian methods. Similarly, after 1870 his
dealings with Russia rested largely on personal engage-
ments to, or from, Alexander 11. and Alexander 1n. Hence
his preference for autocracies; business could be done
with the autocrat, or, as in his own case, with the minister
who had the autocrat well in hand. The continuity of the
individual was more important than the continuity of the
policy. Hence, also, his dislike of France after 1871.
French statesmen came and went like partners at a ball,
and the promise of the first might be good reason for in-
fidelity in the next. Hence still more his dislike of Great
Britain and the British system of publicity and ministerial
responsibility: the more so because, unlike France,
German threats could not cause the fall of a Gladstone or
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 329
a Beaconsfield, a Granville or a Salisbury. 1 Above all, he
detested with a fierce detestation the British Blue-Book 2
which brought government into the arena of public debate
and enlightened the public not with acts, which was all
that the public was entitled to know, but with methods,
which it was certain to misunderstand. Bismarck's
hatred of the British Blue-Book was a blend of the
patrician superstition that foreign policy was a mystery
only to be mastered by the privileged class with a heredi-
tary aptitude for its ritual--a superstition that still obsesses
the well-bred Levites of the cosmopolitan priesthood of
diplomacy--resentment at any government daring to do
anything without his permission, and the fear that if the
blinds of the temple were perpetually drawn up the plain
man would condemn the result because the methods were
so peculiar. Bismarck knew well that the diplomacy which
annexed Schleswig-Holstein, which prepared the war of
1866, which laid the long mine of the Hohenzollern candi-
dature and the 'defensive' war of 1870, and the revision
of the Treaty of 1856 did not cease with the Treaty of
Frankfurt. Peace and those who ensue it have their
victories of lies, stratagems, plots, and counter-plots no
less than have war and the soldiers.
Peace after 1871 was the supreme need for the Empire.
Germany was now a 'satiated' country. The 'injuries
of time ' had been obliterated at last, and Germany, having
obtained by war the conditions on which she desired to
live with her neighbours, now wished for no more than the
maintenance of those conditions, and their development
into a permanent system. It was inevitable that mutilated
and humiliated France should dream of the day when the
Treaty of Frankfurt would be revised--by a successful war
1 Not that Bismarck did not attempt in Great Britain this particularly
German method of controlling policy. There is clear evidence that Bismarck
between 1880 and 1885 tried to get both Lord Derby and Lord Granville dis-
missed, and their places taken by ministers more amenable to German
dictation. The dismissal of Delcasse in 1905 was the Bismarckian stroke by
Bismarck's disciples.
* 'It is astonishing,' wrote Odo Russell to Granville,' how cordially Bismarck
hates our Blue Books. . . . If he once takes offence at anything we publish, he
wiH take his revenge by making himself as disagreeable as possible for the rest
of his days. '--{Life of Granville, ii. p. 367. )
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BISMARCK
of revenge--but the France of 1871 single-handed could
never accomplish that. A France without allies was a
France condemned to accept 1871 as the last word in the
great struggle for the Rhine. The task therefore was to
keep France isolated. The surest way of accomplishing
this was the organisation of Central Europe with the rest
of the States in subordination to the new German Empire.
The isolation of France and the German hegemony of the
Continent were complementary aspects of the same
problem and were complementary results of a single
aim.
Bismarck set to work after 1871 to convince the leading
continental States that it was their interest to accept the
facts of 1871 and keep France isolated. The revival of the
Triple Alliance of the three monarchies of Russia, Austria,
and Imperial Prussia was the first step. 'There is always
a chancellor in Europe,' says M. de Mazade in his illumi-
nating study of Metternich. The difference between the
system of Metternich and that of Bismarck lay in the
transfer of the centre of gravity from Vienna to Berlin.
But that was vital.
The material interests of the Empire, deduced from a
system of political ideas maintained by Germany, with the
nation in arms, as the guardian of both--such was the core
of the Chancellor's system. Prestige in diplomacy also
was a weapon of incalculable strength in Bismarck's hands.
Prussian prestige after 1871 rested on two clearly defined
and intelligible elements--a man and a nation's power.
In 1862 the European chancelleries had felt like the Prus-
sian officers before Jena. 'Your majesty,' they assured
Frederick William in. , 'has several generals superior to
M. de Bonaparte. ' In 1871 they felt what Goethe said of
Napoleon 1. 'You cannot beat him, the man is too
strong for you. ' Personal intercourse with the man
heightened the hypnotism that Bismarck exercised.
His personal diplomacy was a marvellous mixture of
brutality, arrogance, and geniality, of patrician grandeur
aided by the tricks of the card-sharper. A stab in the
back came as easily from his vindictive rancour, as the great
stroke that achieved a long-matured ideal. He might
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
pretend to forget, but he could not forgive, and never
pretended that he did.
The invincibility of Prussia, scientifically organised, so
that her strength could be concentrated on a policy
directed by an unflinching fidelity to a single purpose--
on that assumption he had taken office in 1862, and that
assumption after 1871 he taught Europe to regard as the
first and last axiom of the State system of the Continent.
The power of Germany, a Germany perpetually mobilised
and ready to spring at a word from the Wilhelmstrasse,
was burnt into the mind of Europe, and the German
Foreign Office acted on the assumption in every trans-
action, great or small. 'Germany,' said Moltke in the
Reichstag in 1875, 'must remain armed to the teeth for
fifty years, in order to keep what took her six months to
win. ' The world studied and copied the Prussian army.
Even at our Horse Guards the British military' demi-gods'
began dimly to realise that the conduct of war required
educated brains, and could not be acquired on the parade
ground in the morning and the hunting or cricket-field
in the afternoon. Moltke, however, was determined that
for all the slavish copying of Prussian technique by
Prussia's rivals, the real secret, 'the secret of the higher
command ' should remain an inviolable Prussian monopoly.
Other nations would produce soldiers, but Germany alone
would continue to educate generals. And Bismarck in the
Reichskanzlerpalais had the same determination. The
secret of the higher command in policy, won by the blood
and sweat of a lifetime, must be kept by the same blood and
sweat. If Germany once allowed the quality of that right
judgment in all things on which her prestige in diplomacy
was built to deteriorate, disaster would follow. No
material strength could compensate for an inferiority in
the higher direction.
The confidence of Germany in the Chancellor as the
director of foreign policy and the guardian of Germany's
place in Europe was implicit. The bitter criticism poured
on the successive phases of his home policy scarcely trickled
into the sphere of foreign affairs. Gone were the days of
1862 and 1863, when professors and pathologists, publicists
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? 33*
BISMARCK
and pamphleteers, arraigned before an audience half-
convinced in advance, the foreign policy of the Minister-
President. The Reichstag listened and obeyed, at the
feet of the Master. Bismarck studied and gave great
weight to the volume of public opinion, as his handling of
the colonial question subsequently showed. His speeches
on the delicate problems of international relations were
invariably stamped with the magisterial note, the recog-
nition of the nation's demand for power, and the subtle
personal appeal for confidence. 'Bismarck has,' said Lord
Odo Russell, 'a prophetic coup HceiV He wove into his
analysis autobiographic reminiscences and tantalising
glimpses of the forces moving behind the scene; and the
vanity and egoism with which they were flavoured reflected
the vanity and egoism of the audience. The German
Reichstag was on these occasions, and it knew it, the
Olympus from which Jove spoke to Europe. He made
Germany feel its unity and grandeur. Such speeches,
with their exposition of the realities, were a tonic and an
inspiration. No German but drew deeper lungs after
hearing these utterances of pontifical infallibility from the
tribune of the Reichstag; the speaker himself--that
gigantic figure of the Chancellor, the civil Prime Minister
of the Empire, in a military uniform with his sword at his
side, the nonlike head, the flashing eyes, the gesture of
command, even the hoarse, rasping, and hesitating voice
that made the barbed phrase or the felicitous apophthegm
more telling--the speaker himself was an arresting in-
carnation of Imperial power and of Prussian militarism.
In reviving the triple entente of the Central and Eastern
monarchies Bismarck securely reckoned on the ill-will of
Russia to Great Britain, so patent in the Washington
negotiations and the Genevan arbitration, and the genuine
fear of Liberal and Radical tendencies in France and
Great Britain. 'The downward course' of England
alarmed Alexander n. , who forgot that England had been
going to perdition since 1815, and that some countries
can even wax strong and prosperous on such perdition,
and can be a far safer home for monarchs than the hearth
of order at Petersburg. 'The sacred cause of Royalty' was
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
declared to be imperilled; 'Germany, Austria, and Russia
should hold together to resist those dangerous and evil influ-
ences of England, if order was to be maintained in Europe. '
Dynasticism and order were to be pitted against republican-
ism and the revolution. The solidarity of European Con-
servatism--the familiar catchword took Bismarck back
to the age of Metternich in which he had grown up, and
the school of Gerlach that now proclaimed him a rene-
gade. Toujours ca change, toujours c'est la meme chose.
Bismarck now exploited the shibboleths of the dynasties to
rivet the Bismarckian conception of Central Europe on
Vienna and Petersburg, as he had exploited the shibboleths
of Gerlach to rivet Prussian supremacy on Germany. The
sovereigns met in 1871 at Gastein and Salzburg--which
was ' the coffin' of Beust, about to be dismissed and re-
placed by Andrassy--and in 1872 at Berlin, exchanged
kisses on both cheeks and showered decorations. Bismarck
entertained the royalties and their staffs with diplomatic
reminiscences; he was particularly pleased to dilate on the
tortures suffered by the French negotiators (1870-1), and
explained with genial humour how he had baited the hooks
to play with the fish before landing it. The Emperor
William returned the visits at Petersburg and Vienna.
Koniggratz was forgotten; the reconciliation prepared
by the peace of 1866 proceeded rapidly. 'No formal
treaty was concluded,' the Crown Prince wrote to his
cousin the ruler of Roumania, but the understanding was
intimate and complete. In 1873 Victor Emmanuel also
came to Berlin. His readiness to join Napoleon in 1870
was forgiven and forgotten by his accession to the monar-
chical entente. Bismarck had secured the vulnerable flank
of Germany in the east; he had withdrawn the consti-
tutional kingdom of Italy from gravitating towards the
sister Latin race; France was without an ally.
The Kings
of Holland and Sweden made a pilgrimage to the new
Mecca of royalism and order at Berlin, and Belgium was
compelled to alter her penal code, because Germany did
not think it adequate to deal with Ultramontanes or
Radical journalists. Beyond the Carpathians and in the
valley of the lower Danube stood the Hohenzollern
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BISMARCK
sentinel on guard. The intimate relations between
Bucharest and Berlin, between the Hohenzollern cadet
and the great Hohenzollern Emperor, are written in every
line of the diary of Charles of Roumania. 1 The pacific
penetration of Europe by a Germany, matchless in arms
and science, had begun.
All went as happily as marriage bells, all except the
course of events in the accursed France. Until 1873
France patiently explored the causes of her collapse, and
heroically wrestled with the German indemnity and the
re-making of her army. Thiers, by the Treaty of
March 15, which ended the German occupation, earned
the proud title of ' Liberator of the soil of the patrie,' and
the Monarchical Right promptly rewarded him by hurling
him from power (May 24). Bismarck viewed with pro-
found resentment the recovery of 'the hereditary foe. '
The military and financial convalescence was being speeded
up beyond all anticipation. The restoration of a Catholic
Bourbon royalty, whose legitimacy and lineage dated to an
age when the mushroom monarchism of the Hohenzollerns
had not yet sprouted in the sandy wastes of Brandenburg,
might bring France back into the sacred circle of dynasti-
cism, even become the centre of a Catholic coalition against
Prussia. The Kulturkampf raged in Germany. What if
'Henry v. ,' the 'emigrb of Frohsdorf, proved to be the
'stone' that Pio Nono proclaimed in his visions would
'issue from heaven and break the Colossus'? Mit
der Dummheit kdmpfen Cotter selbst vergebens--one of
Bismarck's favourite quotations--'Against stupidity even
the gods fight in vain. ' 'Henry v. ,' like our 'James in.
and vii1. ' was not of the stuff to recover crowns lost by the
folly of his ancestors. Bismarck's luck did not desert him.
'Henry v. ' refused to make the great renunciation: an
assegai in the South African bush killed the Prince Imperial
(1879); Gambetta died from a poisoned hand in his
forty-fourth year (1882); Skobeleff, who never could
1 'I am here alone,' wrote Prince Charles of Roumania in 1871 to King
William, << a solitary outpost, the sentinel of the frontier against the East . . .
but I am neither so distant nor so wearied but that I can heartily join in the
acclamations for the German Emperor. '
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 335
decide which he desired the more passionately--to lead
the Cossacks into Delhi or into Berlin--died in 1882; and
Harry Arnim, who foretold the Kulturkampf from Rome
in 1869--brilliant, unstable, and cursed with an ambition
and the absence of all the qualities required to achieve it--
was broken and hunted into exile. His place at the
German Embassy in Paris was taken by Prince Hohenlohe,
whose Memoirs reveal how odious to a refined gentleman
was the task of hectoring and bullying France, laid upon
him from the Wilhelmstrasse.
'A republic,' Bismarck decided, 'would find it more
difficult to obtain allies than a monarchy. ' German
diplomacy therefore supported the republicans, while also
aiding every party that would embarrass the republic.
In the republican solution Bismarck saw a Nessus shirt for
France: French Jacobinism clinched the argument pressed
by the royal physicians of Law and Order for keeping the
moral leper in a sanitary isolation.
The war scares of 1874 and l%75 are still an obscure
episode. The argument of German historians and
Bismarck hagiographers that Bismarck did not believe in
'preventive' wars, because he said so in two or three
obscure and probably insincere sentences, is as childish
as Bismarck's own explanation that it was a Stock Exchange
manoeuvre, inflated by the Chauvinism of the General
Staff, the chief of which, Moltke, was a 'street Arab
(gamin) in politics,' and utilised by the vanity of Gort-
schakov to score an empty diplomatic triumph. Moltke
was not a gamin in politics, and Gortschakovs do not win
triumphs over a Bismarck if they have only vanity at their
command. Considering what France had suffered she
was perfectly entitled to make her army as strong as she
could, and in doing so, she only acted on Bismarckian
principles. The Foreign and War Offices in Berlin knew
that a France with a strong army would be an ally worth
having--at Petersburg, for example. The one black fear
that haunted Bismarck--it dated back to 1854--was an
alliance between France and Russia, in which Germany
could not be a third and wrecking partner. Such an
alliance meant the restoration of the Continental Balance
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BISMARCK
of Power which it had been the work of 1866 and 1871 to
destroy. It could be frustrated at the outset by threaten-
ing France with war--compelling her to suspend her re-
organisation and driving her back on the impotence of a
second-rate State. In the winter of 1874-5, Bismarck tried
to pick a quarrel with France because the French bishops
had endorsed the papal encyclical condemning the arrest
of Cardinal Ledochowski, and provoked it by a violent and
inspired press campaign on the menace involved in French
armaments. German armaments, of course, were a proof
of Germany's pacific intentions. Moltke--a real god from
a real machine--was brought from his silence in the War
Office to explain to the Reichstag the serious danger in
which Germany stood. And Moltke explained with an
emphatic brevity that sent a shiver down the patriotic
spine of every German.
It is fairly certain that the famous article in the Post--
'Is War in sight ? '--was inspired by Bismarck, and that
the Emperor had not realised the elaborate manoeuvre
going on behind his back. It is quite certain that the facts
communicated to The Times by De Blowitz, primed by the
Duc Decazes (May 4, 1875), the information sent from
Berlin by Lord Odo Russell, by Lord Lyons from Paris,
and by three German Embassies in three capitals, together
with the information on which Alexander n. and Gort-
schakov acted, and on which Queen Victoria wrote her
famous letter to the Emperor William, were substantially
correct. But Alexander came to Berlin, and by May 10
Gortschakov was able to send his telegram ' Now peace is
assured,' and the British government to say publicly that
it had 'supported, as much as seemed necessary, the ex-
hortations which the Emperor of Russia appeared inclined
to make during his visit. '
Bismarck was very angry. The Prussian General Staff
was quite ready to make a dozen preventive wars, but it is
difficult to believe that the Chancellor meant more than
to drive the Duc Decazes from office, and thus compel
France to reduce her armaments, or possibly to coerce her
into indiscretions in which the chassepots would go off of
themselves. The cause of his anger lay much deeper than
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR
resentment at a personal and public rebuff at the hands
of Gortschakov. He had been completely outplayed in
the diplomatic game. The Emperor told Prince Hohen-
lohe ' I do not wish war with France . . . but I fear that
Bismarck may drag me into it little by little. ' The warn-
ings to the Kaiser from the sovereigns of Great Britain
and Russia turned Bismarck's flank. He was confronted
with a European coalition, and Decazes, thoroughly terrified
as he was, as indeed were all the statesmen in France,
managed the episode very neatly. He remembered July
1870 and behaved with studied discretion. 'Decazes,'
Bismarck is reported to have said,' is like a ball--if pricked,
he rolls away; nothing goes in. ' Bismarck knew, for he
had been pricking the ball assiduously in the hope that
it would not roll, but burst. An appeal from the French
government to Russia and Great Britain elicited a very
clear pronouncement that a war thrust on France would' be
an iniquity' which Europe would not tolerate. Bismarck
realised that he was not dealing with the Duc de Gramont
or the European situation of July 1870. The leading strings
woven for the Triple Alliance of the monarchs did not
prevent independent Russian or British action. In a
word, the Europe that Thiers had ' failed to find ' in 1870
Bismarck ' found ' by colliding violently with it. Europe
earnestly desired peace, but not a peace based on the per-
manent obliteration of France. The whole episode was
a culmination of the perpetual bullying of France by
Bismarck, based on the assumption that the French
government must arrange its internal policy to German
dictation. Arnim, for example, on one occasion said to
the French Foreign Minister,' Remember, I forbid you to
take Tunis--yes, I forbid you. ' 'Bismarck,' wrote Lord
Odo to Lord Derby, 'is at his old tricks again . . . his
sensational policy is very wearisome. ' Europe had not yet
grasped that a hectoring foreign policy was continuously
employed by the Chancellor to lash up German public
opinion and influence the Reichstag. In 1874-5 the
Kulturkampf was in a critical stage. But, with all allow-
ances, the weight of the evidence confidentially laid before
the Russian and British governments convinced them that
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BISMARCK
Germany would pick a quarrel, if it could, with the French
Republic.
The eternal Eastern Question placed a far heavier strain
on Bismarck's system, for at once Great Britain, reluctant
in 1875 openly to take the side of France, stepped into the
centre of the European stage. It proved indeed as critical
as the Greek insurrection had been to Metternich's Holy
Alliance from 1822-30. The revolts of Montenegro,
Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, and the intervention of
Russia, followed by the Russo-Turkish War and the Treaty
of San Stefano, brought Europe within measurable distance
of a European conflagration. Bismarck had endeavoured
to meet the danger by the Berlin memorandum (May 11,
1876), which broke down because Great Britain, rightly
or wrongly, refused to be a party to it. National passion
was rising fast. It was Nationalism that had brought the
Russian armies to the gates of Constantinople. Neither
Great Britain nor Austria had forgotten Russian action in
1870, and the British fleet also was at the gates of Con-
stantinople. Austria could not keep out of a war between
Russia and Great Britain--her interest in the Balkans was
too deep. What was Germany to do in that case: side
with Austria or with Russia, or cut the sorry figure she
had cut in 1854? H she sided openly with Austria or
Russia it was certain that France would find an ally at
once in Germany's enemy. In the winter of 1877-8 Bis-
marck saw the foundation of his system crumbling away.
National ambitions were riving asunder the identity of
dynastic interest expressed in the Entente of the Three
Monarchies. At all costs, therefore, the war in the Near
East must be localised and ended, and the European
problem settled not by arms but by diplomacy.
Bismarck returned from Varzin on February 14. The
preliminaries of peace between Turkey and Russia had
been signed on January 31; on February 7 part of the
British fleet had entered the Sea of Marmora and was
within sight of the Russian lines. On January 14 the
British government, supported by Andrassy, demanded
the revision of the Russo-Turkish treatv by the Concert
of Europe. On February 19 Bismarck reviewed the situa-
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 339
tion for the Reichstag--a masterly performance on a very
slack rope. He emphasised the supreme need of peace, the
justifiability of a European revision, and the disinterested-
ness of Germany. He quietly disclaimed all idea of dic-
tating to any of the great Powers; Germany, however,
could perform one humble and efficient task--' that of the
honest broker'--facilitating business between clients at
cross-purposes, all of whom were the broker's friends.
Beneath the speaker's cool analysis surged the deep bass of
German power. It was because she was so strong that
Germany could be so calm. But if she chose to throw
her incomparable army into the scales, it would be decisive.
Russia had no option but to submit. Her ministers,
however, felt that here indeed was Bismarck's gratitude
for aiding the refusal to submit the Treaty of Frankfurt
to a Congress.
The Congress of Berlin under Bismarck's presidency
testified to the primacy of the German Empire in Europe.
In 1856 Prussia had been kindly allowed the vacant chair
in the Congress of Paris. It was now shared between
France and Turkey. The diplomatic salute that in 1856
had been taken by Napoleon in. was in 1878 taken by
Bismarck. 'The honest broker' did not merely act as a
clearing-house and take a small commission. For two
of the clients at least--Austria and Russia--if not for all,
he wrote out the contract notes and settled the article
to be transferred as well as the price. In 1878 the
principle was quietly laid down that the business of
Continental Europe must henceforward go through the
Berlin Exchange in the Wilhelmstrasse, and transactions
concluded without the Berlin official stamp would always
be at the buyer's or seller's peril.
The details of the Congress belong to general European
history and the particular States immediately concerned.
But apart from the registration of Germany's hegemony,
the Congress raises a pertinent and difficult question. At
what precise point did Germany's and Bismarck's direct
interest in the Near East commence? If we were to
believe the Chancellor's public utterances, that direct
interest did not begin until at least a decade later, if then.
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BISMARCK
In 1876 (December 7, 1876) he pronounced, in a pictur-
esque phrase, that to Germany the Near East was not
worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier, and he con-
tinued to repeat the disclaimer with a monotony and an
emphasis that convey the quintessence of suspiciousness.
It is, however, not necessary to pick the locks of the
German and Turkish archives to prove that for some
years prior to 1878 German diplomacy had been working
with stealthy and steady persistence at displacing British,
Russian, and French influence with the Sublime Porte, and
quietly substituting a German replica of' the great Eltchi,'
Stratford de Redclyffe, as the most important figure
at Constantinople. By 1878 Turkey had been already
taught to recognise that while Russia was an irrecon-
cilable enemy, Austria at best a very interested friend, and
Great Britain a useless ally or an open foe, Germany would
be ready to preserve the integrity of the Ottoman Empire,
in return for political and commercial control. Such a
control was an essential corollary to a secure Central
Empire, and was perfectly compatible with an ultimate
Austrian advance to Salonica. The argument and the
opportunity were immensely heightened by the sequel
to the Berlin Congress--the blunders, in particular, of
Russian policy in the treatment of Roumania and Bulgaria.
But it is demonstrable that the subsequent and growing
resistance of the Ottoman Empire to the Concert of
Europe rested on German support which did not begin in
1879. The success of the European Concert at Berlin in
averting war, and its failure in assigning the Balkans to
the Balkan peoples, were largely due to Bismarck. A
truer perspective has taught us that not ' der alte Jude'
(Beaconsfield) but 'der alte Junker' (Bismarck) was the
great figure at the Congress of Berlin. 1
It is no less true that in 1878 Bismarck primarily en-
1 To-day we can read many reminiscences by those who took part in the
Congress, and many and vivid are the stories related by eye-witnesses of Bismarck.
His temper throughout, we are assured, was ' vile. ' We have the picture of his
fainting, with Gortschakov, who thought he was going to die, offering him a
glass of water, and the Chancellor's reply,' Pas mort, mon cher, pas encore, mon
cher, pas encore! ' or of his striding up and down at a private session and ex-
claiming--' Settle, gentlemen, settle, I insist--to-morrow I go to Varzin. '
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? THE IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR 341
visaged the problem from an Austrian angle. The assign-
ment to Austria of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Sandjak
of Novi Bazar, which opened up the road to the valley of
the Vardar, was certainly the result of a secret agreement
between Austria and Russia, and was probably the result
of a prior agreement between Vienna and Berlin. Tatis-
cheff takes it as proved that as early as 1873 Austria was
to secure such compensation in the Balkan peninsula,
with Germany's approval, as would partially make good
Austrian losses in Germany and Italy. Such a policy was
the logical completion of Bismarck's Central Europe,
based on Austria as a Danubian State, expansion of which
would be south-eastwards. Agreements behind the back of
an ally were part of Bismarck's methods, as the reinsurance
of 1884 and 1887 proved. He was always ready to find com-
pensation in territory that did not belong to Germany for
a State that he had mutilated. The understanding of 1873
was a reinsurance against the entente with Russia of 1872.
A Balkan sphere of control was a sop to the Magyar
ascendency, and since Beust's dismissal in 1871 the recon-
ciliation of Germany and Austria rested on an entente with
Andrassy and the Magyars. Vienna and Buda-Pesth com-
bined could be trusted to stem the tide of Panslavism in the
Balkans and hold the passes until Germany had completed
her diplomatic penetration and decided on her policy.
The international situation was very complicated. But
from his central position at Berlin Bismarck by ceaseless
effort and utilising every turn aimed first at maintaining
the national antagonisms of Russia, Austria, and Great
Britain, which enabled him always to have rival groups
to bargain with; secondly, at continuing the isolation of
France. The European Powers were to be grouped round
Berlin, with Germany as the arbiter of their rivalries.
A study of the evidence available suggests the suspicion1
1 The student can study, for example, the evidence derived from the dispatches
and memoranda in Crispi's Memoirs, vol. ii. ; Lord Newton's Life of Lord Lyons,
Lord Fitzmaurice's Life of Lord GraimiUe, Wertheimer's Life of Andrassy,
Busch's Bismarck, some Secret Pages of his History, Gontaut-Biron's Mon
Ambassade en AUemagne and Dernieres Annies de PAmba. 'sade, the letters of
General Le Flo published in the Figaro (1887), Prince Hohenlohe's Memoirs,
and the unpublished documents cited by M.
