He spoke often, and always
in uncompromising resistance to the Liberal programme.
in uncompromising resistance to the Liberal programme.
Robertson - Bismarck
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BISMARCK
nerve, and strength of ' the mad' and 'wild Junker' of
Kniephof, ready to swim, shoot, hunt, or ride anywhere
and in any weather; no less ready and able to drink half a
dozen lieutenants from neighbouring garrisons under- the
table. The gossip which represented him as a Herculean
Lothario of coarse amours and a fabulous appetite is cer-
tainly exaggerated. But a host who could wake the
tardy guest by pistol-shots through the windows, and
whose irreligious views were more disquieting than his
morals, alarmed the mothers, if they excited the curiosity
of the daughters, in the manor drawing-rooms. Gossip,
however, did not know that the mad Junker was devouring
books--history, philosophy, theology, geography, and
poetry: Feuerbach, Bauer, and Strauss, Schopenhauer,
Lessing, Schiller, Riickert, Lenau, Freiligrath, Uhland,
and especially Goethe, Shakespeare, and Byron. The
effortless felicity of allusion in his speeches to Goethe
and Shakespeare proves the grip that the imaginative
realism of these two master critics of life had on his spirit.
Yet nothing as yet could fill ' the unfathomable weariness
and emptiness' of which a letter speaks; and Bismarck, like
Cavour, left his estates to travel, now to Paris, now to the
northern sea-coasts, now to England, completing his com-
petence in French and English, noting, as always, the
scenery, and storing his impressions of institutions and
society in a retentive memory. 'I feel,' he wrote in 1845,
when his sister Malwine married, 'more than ever my
loneliness in the world. '
The gnawing at his heart, the flux in his ideas, the need
of a sure anchorage in spiritual and moral realities, grew
with the inarticulate ambition for a career wider than
the duties of a manorial lord could provide. The answer
came from an unexpected quarter, and Bismarck owed
it to a woman's ideals. Through the wife, Marie von
Thadden, of his friend, Moritz von Blanckenburg, the
master of Kniephof and Schonhausen was gradually ab-
sorbed into 'the Trieglaff circle'--a group that had
Trieglaff, the Thaddens' estate, for its centre. The
Trieglaff circle linked hands with a more political group
at Berlin, the most important members of which were
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 55
the Gerlachs and Stahl, the writer on political philosophy,
and in this way he began the memorable political friend-
ship with General Leopold and his brother Ludwig von
Gerlach. The blend of evangelical piety, prayer meetings,
conservative politics, and sentimental literary dilettantism,
of spiritual tea-parties and picnics, at first amused and
then interested Bismarck. It was a new type of adventure,
and he was to discover how much a resolute and high-
minded woman can accomplish when she deliberately pits
her strength against the will of a resolute man. Marie
von Blanckenburg had divined the power in this erring,
loyal, and forceful friend of her husband's. She made it
her duty to ' convert' him. She succeeded, though she
did not live to know her success and its results. Her
premature death deeply affected the young man and com-
pleted the conversion. He resumed the habit of prayer
and the study of the Bible; Bauer and Strauss went into
the wastepaper basket; his cynical and agnostic Pan-
theism melted like snow in the midday sunshine of April.
He returned to the unquestioning Lutheran faith of his
ancestors. His mind was made up, and henceforward
his was a conviction impregnable to all the doubts, fears,
or disillusionment provided by the life that began in 1847,
and ended in the homage of a united Germany in 1898.
'I cannot conceive,' he wrote to his wife, 'how a man
who reflects and yet knows nothing of God, and will know
nothing, can endure his life for contempt and boredom.
I do not know how I formerly endured. If I lived now
as I did then, without God, without thee, without chil-
dren, I cannot think why I should not put life aside like
a dirty shirt. ' In 1870 he said: 'I know not whence I
should derive my sense of duty, if hot from God: orders
and titles have no charm for me ; I firmly believe in a life
after death, and that is why I am a Royalist: by nature
I am disposed to be a Republican. . . . Were I not a
staunch Christian, did I not stand upon the miraculous
basis of religion, you would never have possessed a Federal
Chancellor in my person. '
Love and marriage consummated Marie von Blancken-
burg's work. An attachment to Johanna von Puttkamer,
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BISMARCK
the daughter of neighbours at Reinfeld, steadily deepened
into passion. The father who ' had heard much evil and
little good' of the suitor for his daughter's hand, was
reluctant to consent; but Bismarck was not one to be
thwarted when he had set his heart on success, and he had
Fraulein von Puttkamer on his side. 'All right' was the
brief announcement in English to his sister of his betrothal
(January 12, 1847). His marriage followed on July 25,
and a happy marriage it certainly was. In his domestic
life Bismarck is seen at his best. What his wife was to
him and what he was to her can be read in a correspon-
dence which is real literature, and a precious human and
historical document. 'I cannot,' he wrote from Biarritz
in 1851, 'enjoy seeing so much beauty away from you. '
'My wife,' he said, thirty years later, ' made me what I
am. ' That adequately sums up an intimacy into which
we need not pry further. There was a great place in 1846
waiting for a woman to^fill. Johanna von Puttkamer
showed her quality simply by filling it.
Fate had already tapped at the door. Between Bis-
marck's betrothal and his marriage (April 3 to June 24)
the united Diet had met in Berlin, quarrelled with the
Crown, and been prorogued. Bismarck was one of its
members, confronted in a public capacity for the first
time with the Liberal and National forces, to which in
numerous utterances he opposed a defiant and unbending
Conservatism. He denied that the national rising of 1813
had any constitutional significance, and had any other
object than the natural Prussian desire to hurl the foreign
invader from the Fatherland. The remark provoked
fierce dissent from the Liberal benches. Bismarck pulled
a newspaper from his pocket and read it, standing, until
the assembly was quiet. He asserted that the Crown of
Prussia was worn by the grace of God, not by the grace
of the nation; he denied the right of Jews to hold office
in a Christian State, rejected as irrelevant all parallels
between Prussia and foreign countries, and maintained that
abandonment of the Christian basis of the State would
reduce it to a fortuitous aggregate of philosophical rights.
The young man of thirty-two was in collision with ideas
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 57
and with men he disliked on political and social grounds,
and he opposed to them the traditions of the governing
class to which he belonged, and which these rebels would
destroy in the Prussia that the nobles had made. He gave
vigorous expression to the creed of Prussian particularism.
Nationalism was the traditional patriotism of Prussians,
obeying an unfettered Crown ruling as it pleased through
a hereditary aristocracy. Liberalism would destroy the
historic Prussia, which must remain the Prussia of Frederick
the Great, whom Gerlach noted Bismarck had already
adopted as his model. In all these utterances there is no
recognition that the strength of Liberalism lay in its
mandate to represent forces within and without Prussia
that could not be refuted by the rubric and articles of the
crude conservatism of a caste, there is no appreciation
of the gravity and complexity of the German problem
or of Prussia's duty to Germany. The two impressive
characteristics in these speeches are the unmistakable
sincerity of the speaker's convictions and the undefinable
atmosphere of independence which can grow into leader-
ship. Bismarck spoke for himself, but he more than
voiced, and men felt it, his party. He was pointing the
way, and not merely tramping in the footsteps of others.
Well might the Liberals already call him the champion
of the Ultras; well might Leopold von Gerlach rejoice
that here was an ally and a disciple after his own heart.
The young Junker had made his mark. At his marriage
enthusiastic friends hailed him as a new Otto the Saxon,
a coming Otto the Great.
Allies and disciples of the old dispensation. were needed.
At Venice Frederick William iv. received Bismarck
travelling on his honeymoon. Sovereign and subject next
met after the Barricades in Berlin. Before the united
Diet could renew its rejected demands, the Revolution
of 1848 had swept over Germany and Europe.
? 2. The Junker Politician, 1848-1851
The astonishing period from the March days in Berlin
and Vienna - to the Convention of Olmiitz and the
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BISMARCK
restoration of the fallen Federal Constitution and Diet of
1815, provides a panorama overloaded with bewildering
and complicated events. The revolutionary spirit en-
graved her record with steel on hearts insurgent and
scorched with fire. In the evolution of Bismarck's per-
sonality and the principles of his statecraft ' 1848 ' closed
one chapter and opened another.
The main framework and background can be briefly
disentangled. The first phase lasted from March 10 to
November 1, during which Austria was crippled by con-
tinual riots and placed practically out of action. This
gave the simultaneous risings in Germany the upper
hand, and enabled the leaders of the Revolution to con-
centrate their efforts on the National Parliament at
Frankfurt, and to work through a national assembly in
Berlin for drastic reforms in Prussia. The fate of the
Revolution depended on the capacity of this movement
to make good its work before the Austrian government
could recover and challenge its supremacy. The National
Assembly met at Frankfurt on May 13, the Prussian
Constituent Assembly on May 22; but by the end of
June the revolution in Prague had been mastered, and on
November 1 Vienna was in the hands of Windischgratz,
and the Ministry of Schwarzenberg, a determined foe to
the Revolution, was set up.
A second phase began with November 1, and lasted
until April 28, 1849, in which Austria, aided by Prussia,
practically killed the Frankfurt programme. Hungary,
with the aid of Russia, was reduced; the battle of Novara
(March 23, 1849) virtually crushed the revolution against
Austria in Northern Italy; in Berlin the National As-
sembly, removed from the capital, was dissolved, and a
written Prussian Constitution, drafted by the Crown, was
proclaimed (December 5). This was a blow at the
Frankfurt Constitution-makers, whose success depended
on the acceptance by the German States of the national
unification, nearing completion at Frankfurt. The im-
position by the Emperor of a new constitution on Austria
(March 4, 1849) drove the Prussian stroke home. In
April Austria practically declared war on the Frankfurt
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 59
party. The Liberals had one chance left--to secure
Prussia and pit her in alliance with Liberal Germany
against Austria. The hereditary Imperial Crown of a
Germany unified on a Liberal basis, guaranteed by
the written constitution drawn up at Frankfurt, was
offered to Frederick William iv. The Prussian govern-
ment rejected the Frankfurt Constitution, and the King
definitely refused the Crown (April 25). The Liberal
Revolution had failed.
In the third phase, which lasted until October 5, 1850,
the interest concentrates on the attempt of Prussia to
make her own solution, an effort mainly influenced by
the policy of Radowitz. While Prussian troops were
suppressing the remnant of Republican irreconcilables
in Baden and the south, the Prussian government en-
deavoured to form a union of the four kingdoms of
Hanover, Saxony, Wiirttemberg, and Bavaria with the
petty states under Prussian leadership. The Union was
to have a joint Directory, a common Parliament, and
a constitution, to consist only of voluntary members,
and to establish a close understanding with Austria, ex-
cluded from the Germany thus unified. The surrender
of Vilagos (August 12) and of Venice (August 22) left
Austria now completely free to deal with the Germany
that would exclude her from all share in the Prussian
Union. The Frankfurt Liberals decided to support
the Prussian scheme, but by October 5 the four kingdoms,
influenced by Austria, had seceded from the League.
Austria had killed the original scheme of the Union.
Would and could Prussia, with the petty States, carry the
truncated scheme against the four kingdoms and Austria,
and establish a union of North Germany under her
leadership?
The fourth phase was closed by the Convention or
Punctation of Olmiitz (November 29, 1850). A Parlia-
ment of the Union met at Erfurt, approved a draft
Constitution, and adjourned (April 29, 1850). Austria
replied by demanding the revival of the old Diet. The
Electpr of Hesse-Cassel was at a deadlock with his sub-
jects; Hesse-Cassel professed to be a member of the
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? 6o
BISMARCK
Union, but the Elector appealed to the old Diet, and his
cause was supported by Austria, Bavaria and Wiirttemberg.
A Federal execution was ordered. Resistance by Prussia
meant war with A\istria and her allies in the Diet, on
behalf of Liberalism in Hesse-Cassel and the Erfurt
Union. Behind Austria stood the Tsar Nicholas 1. , the
spirit incarnate of legitimism and the counter-revolution.
The Prussian Court was divided. Many Prussian Con-
servatives, including Prince William, the heir to the
throne, were for war. Much as they disliked Liberalism,
their Prussian pride could not brook the humiliation of
surrender to Austria. The Austrian party at the Berlin
Court, however, only desired to destroy the Revolution
and to work with the cause of legitimism at Vienna. War
by Prussia in alliance with Liberalism meant civil war in
Germany, which must end either in the victory of the
Revolution or the destruction of Prussia. Radowitz's
resignation on November 3 proclaimed Prussia's refusal
to take up the challenge of Austria. The Convention of
Olmutz registered the abandonment of the Union and
the acceptance by Prussia of the Austrian ultimatum.
The Austrian School at the Prussian Court had vanquished
alike the conservative Prussian particularists and Liberalism
within and without Prussia.
The final phase ended on May 16, 1851. Austrian
proposals to modify the old Federal Constitution in her
favour failed. To the exile Metternich's joy, the old
Confederation was revived unaltered. The position had
swung back to that in February 1848, with one important
qualification. Prussia accepted a secret alliance with
Austria, by which in return for the maintenance of her
territorial integrity she guaranteed the whole, and not
merely the German part, of the Austrian Empire. The
triumph of Austrianism was complete. The attempt to
unify Germany through revolution and on the principles
of Liberalism had collapsed. Nationalism had collapsed
also. When Frederick vn. in 1848 succeeded to the
Danish throne, the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein
demanded joint admission to the Germanic Confederation.
The Duke of Augustenburg, who claimed to be the heir
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 61
to the Duchies, was supported by Prussia, whose troops
overran Schleswig. It looked as if the Duchies were to be
won for Germany; but Prussia (August 26) made the
truce of Malmo with Denmark. Next year, when the
Revolution had failed, the Danes compelled Prussia, un-
supported by the European Powers or by Austria, to with-
draw her troops. The Treaty of London of 1852, drawn
up by a European Conference, guaranteed the integrity
of the Danish Kingdom, provided for the succession to
the Danish Crown, and restored the status quo in the
Duchies. The attempt, which had the enthusiastic sup-
port of the Revolution to liberate 'unredeemed' Ger-
many from Danish control, and establish a German
democratic government in the Duchies, had ended
in a complete failure, for which Prussia was largely
responsible.
Throughout these three years Bismarck developed a
fiery energy. Fear was not a word to be found in his
dictionary; his will could dispose of an iron physique in
the prime of manhood. From the March days when he
scribbled a note to the King, urging him to stand firm,
he was always ready to organise resistance, or, if need be,
to head a coup <S? ? . tat. He expressed his views with the
brusque and vivid frankness which shocked and puzzled
the courts and diplomatists 'du vieux pantalon,' and was
a blow in the face of the Liberal benches. He was present
in the Marble Hall of the Palace at Potsdam on that grey
March evening in 1848 when Frederick William iv. , pale
and exhausted in mind and body, announced to the
assembled officers, waiting for the command of the War-
Lord to clear the rebel canaille from the streets of the
capital, the order for the withdrawal of the troops--a
capitulation to the Revolution. An angry clatter of half-
drawn swords thrust back into the scabbards, and a growl
of indignant mutiny, swept over the hall, ' such as a King
of Prussia in the midst of his officers had never heard
before and, I hope, will never hear again. ' Though he
had no part in the memorable Parliament of all Germany
in the Church of St. Paul at Frankfurt, Bismarck was a
member of the Prussian United Diet, of the Constituent
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? BISMARCK
Assembly, and the National Assembly at Berlin, and of the
Union Parliament at Erfurt.
He spoke often, and always
in uncompromising resistance to the Liberal programme.
He took part in the so-called 'Junker Parliament' of
August 1848--a conference of the Conservative Ultras
organised in a league for defence of king and country. He
was one of the group which founded and wrote for the
Kuuzzeitung, henceforward the leading organ of the
Conservative Party; throughout he remained in the
closest touch with the Gerlach Circle, the organisers of
the famous Camarilla, the unofficial secret ministry which
utilised the social position of its members and political
intrigues to undermine every minister tainted with
Liberalism, and to force the vacillating and impressionable
Frederick William iv. into obedience to the counter-
revolution. No member of the Conservative rank and
file worked harder than Bismarck to defeat the Revolution
of the Barricades, the Liberalism of Frankfurt, or the
Union policy of Radowitz. But he remained in the
rank and file. The efforts of the Camarilla to secure
office for him failed. Frederick William recognised the
unimpeachable loyalty of this Junker subject, but to have
given office to this 'red reactionary, smacking of blood,
only to be employed when the bayonet reigns without
reservation,' would have involved a breach with the
Moderates as well as with the Liberals. The King pro-
bably saw in Bismarck the representative of the men who
waged a truceless war on every effort to link the destinies
of Prussia with a Germany from which Austria was ex-
cluded. The influence of Radowitz was predominant
until Austria made it clear that the King of Prussia must
choose between war and surrender. It is not improbable
that Frederick William justly feared the influence of
Bismarck's resolute will on his own obstinate irresolution.
Nursing to the end the dream of a monarchical Prussia
which should gather in a free union under its eagle wings
the German kings, grand dukes, and landgraves, and build
a golden bridge to meet an imperial and purified Austria,
Frederick William shrank from the pitiless freelance,
master of the flouting. phrase that stuck, who amidst
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 63
courts and national assemblies superheated with sentiment
sought for realities and realities alone.
'1 was a terrible Junker in those days,' Bismarck re-
marked long after. '1 grant,' he said in 1847,' that I am
full of prejudices; I sucked them in with my mother's
milk and I cannot argue them away. ' It is a trifle, but a
significant one, that in 1848 he deliberately inserted in his
public and private letters the 'von' in front of the Bismarck
in his signature, which hitherto he had not used. As
Frederick William said at Cologne, ' There are kings still
in Germany, and I am one of them,' so Bismarck conveyed
that there were nobles still in Germany and he was one of
them. 'A terrible Junker,' yes, but not an unattractive
one, though he lacked the higher graciousness. His
superb physical vigour, his courage, his love of meat and
drink and tobacco, his power to drink and enjoy the cup of
life to the dregs, a buoyant geniality, and an amazing
frankness, extorted admiration even from his bitterest
opponents. The trenchancy of his principles was matched
by the unrestrained recklessness of his tongue. He re-
velled in his irresponsibility and the power to castigate
everything and every one he disliked. 'A handsome,
muscular, and truly noble figure,' is the description of an
eye-witness, 'in which is revealed in every feature the
chivalrous courage and also the refinement of the landed
aristocracy'; 'un gaillard avec le diable au corps,' summed
up another critic. He was, in fact, the Bismarck of
Kniephof and the United Diet, battling now in a Ber-
serker lust for the fray with Revolution and anti-Prussians.
To be young was good, to be strong was better, to have
your adversary in your power and crush him was best of all.
'Every courtesy,' he told the Liberal von Vincke at the
buffet in the interval of a heated debate, ' every courtesy
as far as the gallows,' and he meant it. The Minister-
President of the 'sixties, who could not sleep because he
was hating all night, could assuredly boil with passion
and disdain at thirty-two. Yet SchOnhausen and his
wife and the children now being born to him, were always
in his mind. He yearned for his manorial hearth, for the
sonatas of Beethoven, when the day's work in the field or
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? 64
BISMARCK
forest was over, and he could smoke his long pipe in the
corner by the great stove. At Erfurt in the spring of 1851
he would leave the Parliament to despatch tender inquiries
about measles or headaches, to stroll for hours through the
pine woods in the sunshine, watching the birds, noting
the cattle in the field, and reckoning the value of the
timber, or he smoking countless cigars staring up at the blue
sky and reflecting that a landowner's life was freer and far
more enjoyable than these accursed politics, made worse
by the nerveless ministers who ought to drink a bottle
of champagne at every meal to give them some courage
and grit.
His political creed was as lucid as the terms in which he
expressed it. It was idle, he said in April 1848, to regret
the March days. The monarchy had itself thrown the
earth on the coffin. He could have had some sympathy,
he remarked, with the Revolution if it had proposed to
plant the German flag on the cathedral of Strasburg; it
only proposed to fasten on the healthy body of Prussia
the Nessus shirt of Gallican Jacobinism. Similarly, the
Prussian Constitution of December 5 (limited as it was)
went further than he wished, but it was a free gift from
the Crown, and it must be accepted and worked because it
came from the Crown and not from the gutter. All at-
tempts to deduce from it principles contradictory to the un-
fettered prerogative of the sovereign were illegitimate, and
must be resisted. Two points he never tired of pressing:
first, the specific and unique character of the Prussian
State; secondly, its incompatibility with the Liberalism
which would dissolve the historic independence of
Prussia in a mongrel German unity. 'What has held us
together,' he said on September 6, 1849, 'is exactly our
specific Prussianism. It was the residue of the decried
Prussianism which survived the Revolution--I mean the
Prussian army, our Prussian treasure, the fruit of long
years of intelligent administration and the living instru-
ment that stands between the Prussian king and his
people. . . . That people from which this army is drawn,
and of which the army is the truest representative, has no
desire to see its Prussian monarchy drowned in the putrid
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 65
yeast of South German anarchy. . . . We all desire the
Prussian eagle to spread its guardian and governing wings
from the Memel to the Donnersberg, but free will we see
him, not fettered by a new Parliament at Regensburg, not
sheltering under the feathers of the levelling vulture from
Frankfurt. . . . Prussians we are and Prussians we will
remain. I know that I express in these words the creed
of the majority of my countrymen, and I hope to God we
shall remain Prussians long after this piece of paper has
been forgotten like a withered autumn leaf. ' A dozen
similar passages to the same effect could be quoted. Bis-
marck rejoiced over the rejection of the Imperial Crown
offered by the Frankfurt National Parliament.
'The phantoms,' he said, ' of the theorists at Frankfurt
have cost us in six months more blood, money and tears
than thirty-three years of despotism. . . . The Frankfurt
Crown may be very brilliant, but the gold which gives
reality to the brilliance must first be won by melting down
the Prussian Crown, and I have no confidence that the
recasting will fit the form of our Prussian Constitution.
My Prussian patriotism and so-called antediluvian point
of view are as precious to me as a refuge from the flood in
Noah's ark. '
, ' I fear,'"he exclaimed, ' the whimpering sentimentality
of our century, which discovers a martyr in every fanatical
rebel and in every discontented fighter at the barricades. '
And he stated his own theory of political government when
he said:--
'History provides us with the most brilliant and grand,
though not the most beneficial, phenomenon in a special
degree under the mark of absolutism, but we can find more
numerous examples of lasting political prosperity and
power in States subject to the influence of a hereditary
aristocracy . . . the brilliant memories of the German
Empire point to a powerful Imperial nobility. The
mediaeval prosperity of our cities began to wither at the
time when the patrician families went down before the
pressure of the Guilds . . . England trod a happier path;
she had no Richelieu who cut off the heads in which a
hereditary wisdom resides to an exceptional degree. The
B. E
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BISMARCK
character of the English Revolution is Freedom, of the
French, Equality . . . French Equality is the will-of-the-
wisp, daughter of Envy and Greed, pursued without
success by that richly gifted nation for sixty years through
blood and madness. Let us refuse to join in that pursuit
on the false supposition that it is popular. '
Radowitz's resignation and the collapse of his policy
filled Bismarck with such joy that he danced on his chair
round his room three times. The humiliating convention
of Olmiitz occasioned the most weighty and remarkable
speech he had yet made. Nothing was easier, he pointed
out, than to make war; but, with an indirect allusion to
Frederick the Great:--
'The one sound basis of a great Power which differen-
tiates it essentially from the petty State, is political egoism
and not romanticism, and it is unworthy of a great State
to fight for what is not connected with its interest. . . .
Woe to the statesman who at this time has not sought a
reason for going to war which after the war will no less
stand the test. '
He rejected the idea that honour required Prussia ' to
play the Don Quixote all over Germany on behalf of
sickly demagogues, who imagined their local constitutions
in danger. ' And then he came to close grips with his real
gravamen against the whole policy of the Erfurt Union.
The Union involved nothing less than the destruction
of Prussia's independence, not by the princes, but by the
parliaments of the petty States. A war by Prussia to main-
tain the Union could only recall to his mind the English-
man who overpowered the sentinel in order that he might
vindicate the right of every free Briton to commit suicide
in the sentry-box.
In this speech Bismarck, for all its lucid trenchancy of
expression, was groping his way to settled principles of
foreign policy. It was not the interest of Prussia to fight
'as the shameful ally of democracy' against Austria: she
could attain her objects by co-operation with, not by
opposition to, Austria, and the identity of Prussian and
Austrian interests made war unjustifiable in 1850. Bis-
marck was also answering in advance the critics who have
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 67
urged that twenty years later it was this same Bismarck
who practically carried out Radowitz's programme--the
unification of North Germany under Prussia's presidency
--and only carried it out at the price Radowitz was not
allowed to pay in 1850, war with Austria and her allies,
the German kingdoms. The criticism ignores the deep-
seated grounds of Bismarck's opposition to Radowitz's
policy. In 1850, Prussia's one possible ally was Liberalism
in Germany: a Prussian victory would be not a victory
for Prussia's independence and position as a great state,
but for Liberalism. The Liberals, not Prussia, would give
the law to Prussia and Germany. But war was only a
continuance of policy--a policy based on specific Prussian
interests--to enable Prussia to establish the relations on
which she wished to live in peace with her neighbours and
rivals. The last thing that the Bismarck of 1850 or of.
1866 desired or regarded as a real Prussian interest, was
the triumph of Liberalism. Moreover, in 1850 Radowitz,
in Bismarck's judgment, miscalculated. Behind Austria
and her German allies stood the sinister strength of a
Russia which had struck down Hungary, and was about to
impose its will in Schleswig-Holstein. Across the Rhine
was a revolutionary France, ready to intervene. In 1866
France's neutrality had been secured, a crippled Russia
was benevolently neutral, Italy was Prussia's ally. A vic-
torious Prussia would annex Schleswig-Holstein and more.
In brief, between the statecraft of Radowitz and that of
Bismarck there was no identity in temper, methods,
principles, or aims. The two men interpreted the interest
of Prussia and of Germany as differently as two opposed
minds could.
In 1850, his whole argument hinged on the contention
that the Union of Erfurt was a false step in the wrong
direction, and rested on the fundamental and explicit
assumption that the historic Prussia could secure 'her
interests and her honour' by the loyal co-operation of
Austria and Prussia. The words were Bismarck's, but the
voice was the voice of the Gerlachs and the cosmopolitan
Conservatives who saw in a renewed Holy Alliance with
Austria the salvation of Prussia and the defeat of the
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BISMARCK
Revolution. In 1850 ' the terrible Junker ' had not pene-
trated to the heart either of Germany or of Austria, nor had
he defined for himself, except in a superficial and conven-
tional way, ' the interest, the egoism' which ought to be
the sole basis of Prussian policy. But, as yet, he was not
aware that his knowledge was very limited and his inter-
pretation shallow and retarding.
Generally for Germany, the restoration of the old Diet
in 1851 registered two decisive defeats--the defeat of the
Revolution, and of Prussia. Liberalism in alliance with
Nationalism set out, through revolution, to achieve uni-
fication, and to create a truly federal organisation with
democratic and responsible parliamentary government,
under an imperial and limited monarchy, the whole de-
fined and embodied in a written constitution. The
Liberal majority in the National Assembly at Frankfurt had
rejected the programme of Radical Republicanism. It had
also rejected the programme of the Great German Party
(Gross-Deutschland). The German provinces of Austria,
included in the old Bund, were excluded. The organi-
sation of the excluded Austria was left to Austria, and the
political and fiscal relations between the new German
Empire (KleinrDeutschland) and the reconstituted Austrian
Empire were reserved for later diplomatic arrangements.
But the authors of the Constitution of 1848 contemplated
not merely a political alliance, but a spiritual and moral
union wider and deeper than the formal bargain of a
treaty--the creation of a central Germanic Europe, finding
its expression in the material framework of constitutional
and economic organisation, and guaranteed by a com-
munity of purpose in the intellectual and political life of
two self-governing and democratic empires.
This comprehensive scheme, the work of high-minded
and able men, was a noble and imaginative effort in con-
structive statesmanship, which bears the stamp of the
idealism and an inspiring belief in the capacities of a race
for achieving salvation when men build on the uplands,
and not the lowlands, of human endeavour. What con-
structive statesmanship, indeed, has ever achieved per-
manent results on the theory that the spiritual and in-
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 69
tellectual consciousness of nationhood can be satisfied or
stifled by economic and material well-being alone? Had
the unification of 1848 been given a fair trial it would
have moulded the German mind and directed German
destinies and ambitions into paths of self-development
of incalculable benefit to Germany and the world.
Its failure was a tragedy for German and European
civilisation.
That failure is commonly ascribed to the academic
amateurism of its authors, who wasted their time in thresh-
ing out fundamental rights when apparently they should
have been cutting off heads or shooting down opposition,
or lynching the King of Prussia. Such criticism is really
amateur, Philistine, and ignorant of what revolution by
Liberal methods from an old to a new system implies. As
if the task of devising a federal unification of the Germany
of 1848 and of solving the German problem could have
been accomplished by any brain or any action in a few
weeks, least of all by force.
In 1866, Bismarck with the experience of 1848 and
twenty years of earnest constructive thought by many
brains at his disposal, with Austria and her German allies
prostrate, with a Prussian monarch wholly on his side and
a victorious Prussian army at his beck and call, took ten
months to work out, impose and bring into operation a
unification, not of all Germany, but of the north alone--
and Bismarck had been preparing for the task for four
unrelenting years.
The remarkable feature of 1848, in reality, was the
rapidity with which in the smoke and dust of a bewildering
revolution the liberal majority hammered out by argument
and under the conditions of government by public meeting,
a scheme of unification that probed deeper and was more
complete than the constitution of 1867. The men who
could accomplish that, in spite of their lack of training in
public affairs, were not unfitted to be leaders and teachers
in self-government, or to make the policy and control the
destinies of a great nation.
What they did lack was an army and the executive
organs of government, and before they could create them
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BISMARCK
they were crushed not by Germany, nor the princes, but
by Russia and Austria--the two foreign States to which
Liberalism and Nationalism, as Germans understood them,
were anathema. The hero of the reaction was Nicholas i. ,
without whose aid Schwarzenberg and Windischgratz
could not have mastered Prague and Vienna, nor dictated
the surrenders of Vilagos, Olmiitz, and Novara. Liberal-
ism went down. Radical Republicanism does not appear
again as a force to be reckoned with, except perhaps in
sporadic and convulsive efforts in Wurttemberg. But
Liberalism was not killed, neither was its twin, Nationalism.
The defeat and failure of Prussia--also at the hands of
Russia and Austria--was the second outstanding fact in
1851. Prussia, unlike the Liberals of Frankfurt, had both
an army and executive organs of government. Unlike
Austria and almost every other German State, she had not
been mastered by the Revolution. The strength of the
monarchy and the grip of the royal autocracy on the army
and the governing class were as convincingly revealed, as
after the disaster of Jena. But from the March Days until
Olmiitz Prussia was hopelessly divided. The Liberals
under G. von Vincke, the Moderate Conservatives under
Brandenburg, the Constitutionalists led by Radowitz.
the Junker Camarilla, under the Gerlachs, the Militarists
thirsting for a coup d'Etat in the manner of Schwarzenberg,
Windischgratz and Haynau, the pure Particularists exem-
plified in Prince William, ' the Cartridge Prince,' the heir
to the throne, to whom first and foremost Prussia was a
Grossmacht, which must fight for honour and independence,
the Poles in Prussian Poland crying out for national inde-
pendence, the clericals from the Rhenish districts to whom
the secular omnipotence of the autocracy was as dangerous
as the secular atheism of the Revolution, and the Com-
munists of the Vorwarts, founded by Karl Marx from
Prussian Trier and Engels from Prussian Barmen--the
men who created both the socialism of Lassalle and Bebel
--all these whirled in vortices of varying strength round
the King, who could have led if he could have made up his
mind, or could have been deprived of a mind to make up
But Frederick William persistently refused either to frame
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? 54
BISMARCK
nerve, and strength of ' the mad' and 'wild Junker' of
Kniephof, ready to swim, shoot, hunt, or ride anywhere
and in any weather; no less ready and able to drink half a
dozen lieutenants from neighbouring garrisons under- the
table. The gossip which represented him as a Herculean
Lothario of coarse amours and a fabulous appetite is cer-
tainly exaggerated. But a host who could wake the
tardy guest by pistol-shots through the windows, and
whose irreligious views were more disquieting than his
morals, alarmed the mothers, if they excited the curiosity
of the daughters, in the manor drawing-rooms. Gossip,
however, did not know that the mad Junker was devouring
books--history, philosophy, theology, geography, and
poetry: Feuerbach, Bauer, and Strauss, Schopenhauer,
Lessing, Schiller, Riickert, Lenau, Freiligrath, Uhland,
and especially Goethe, Shakespeare, and Byron. The
effortless felicity of allusion in his speeches to Goethe
and Shakespeare proves the grip that the imaginative
realism of these two master critics of life had on his spirit.
Yet nothing as yet could fill ' the unfathomable weariness
and emptiness' of which a letter speaks; and Bismarck, like
Cavour, left his estates to travel, now to Paris, now to the
northern sea-coasts, now to England, completing his com-
petence in French and English, noting, as always, the
scenery, and storing his impressions of institutions and
society in a retentive memory. 'I feel,' he wrote in 1845,
when his sister Malwine married, 'more than ever my
loneliness in the world. '
The gnawing at his heart, the flux in his ideas, the need
of a sure anchorage in spiritual and moral realities, grew
with the inarticulate ambition for a career wider than
the duties of a manorial lord could provide. The answer
came from an unexpected quarter, and Bismarck owed
it to a woman's ideals. Through the wife, Marie von
Thadden, of his friend, Moritz von Blanckenburg, the
master of Kniephof and Schonhausen was gradually ab-
sorbed into 'the Trieglaff circle'--a group that had
Trieglaff, the Thaddens' estate, for its centre. The
Trieglaff circle linked hands with a more political group
at Berlin, the most important members of which were
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 55
the Gerlachs and Stahl, the writer on political philosophy,
and in this way he began the memorable political friend-
ship with General Leopold and his brother Ludwig von
Gerlach. The blend of evangelical piety, prayer meetings,
conservative politics, and sentimental literary dilettantism,
of spiritual tea-parties and picnics, at first amused and
then interested Bismarck. It was a new type of adventure,
and he was to discover how much a resolute and high-
minded woman can accomplish when she deliberately pits
her strength against the will of a resolute man. Marie
von Blanckenburg had divined the power in this erring,
loyal, and forceful friend of her husband's. She made it
her duty to ' convert' him. She succeeded, though she
did not live to know her success and its results. Her
premature death deeply affected the young man and com-
pleted the conversion. He resumed the habit of prayer
and the study of the Bible; Bauer and Strauss went into
the wastepaper basket; his cynical and agnostic Pan-
theism melted like snow in the midday sunshine of April.
He returned to the unquestioning Lutheran faith of his
ancestors. His mind was made up, and henceforward
his was a conviction impregnable to all the doubts, fears,
or disillusionment provided by the life that began in 1847,
and ended in the homage of a united Germany in 1898.
'I cannot conceive,' he wrote to his wife, 'how a man
who reflects and yet knows nothing of God, and will know
nothing, can endure his life for contempt and boredom.
I do not know how I formerly endured. If I lived now
as I did then, without God, without thee, without chil-
dren, I cannot think why I should not put life aside like
a dirty shirt. ' In 1870 he said: 'I know not whence I
should derive my sense of duty, if hot from God: orders
and titles have no charm for me ; I firmly believe in a life
after death, and that is why I am a Royalist: by nature
I am disposed to be a Republican. . . . Were I not a
staunch Christian, did I not stand upon the miraculous
basis of religion, you would never have possessed a Federal
Chancellor in my person. '
Love and marriage consummated Marie von Blancken-
burg's work. An attachment to Johanna von Puttkamer,
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? 56
BISMARCK
the daughter of neighbours at Reinfeld, steadily deepened
into passion. The father who ' had heard much evil and
little good' of the suitor for his daughter's hand, was
reluctant to consent; but Bismarck was not one to be
thwarted when he had set his heart on success, and he had
Fraulein von Puttkamer on his side. 'All right' was the
brief announcement in English to his sister of his betrothal
(January 12, 1847). His marriage followed on July 25,
and a happy marriage it certainly was. In his domestic
life Bismarck is seen at his best. What his wife was to
him and what he was to her can be read in a correspon-
dence which is real literature, and a precious human and
historical document. 'I cannot,' he wrote from Biarritz
in 1851, 'enjoy seeing so much beauty away from you. '
'My wife,' he said, thirty years later, ' made me what I
am. ' That adequately sums up an intimacy into which
we need not pry further. There was a great place in 1846
waiting for a woman to^fill. Johanna von Puttkamer
showed her quality simply by filling it.
Fate had already tapped at the door. Between Bis-
marck's betrothal and his marriage (April 3 to June 24)
the united Diet had met in Berlin, quarrelled with the
Crown, and been prorogued. Bismarck was one of its
members, confronted in a public capacity for the first
time with the Liberal and National forces, to which in
numerous utterances he opposed a defiant and unbending
Conservatism. He denied that the national rising of 1813
had any constitutional significance, and had any other
object than the natural Prussian desire to hurl the foreign
invader from the Fatherland. The remark provoked
fierce dissent from the Liberal benches. Bismarck pulled
a newspaper from his pocket and read it, standing, until
the assembly was quiet. He asserted that the Crown of
Prussia was worn by the grace of God, not by the grace
of the nation; he denied the right of Jews to hold office
in a Christian State, rejected as irrelevant all parallels
between Prussia and foreign countries, and maintained that
abandonment of the Christian basis of the State would
reduce it to a fortuitous aggregate of philosophical rights.
The young man of thirty-two was in collision with ideas
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 57
and with men he disliked on political and social grounds,
and he opposed to them the traditions of the governing
class to which he belonged, and which these rebels would
destroy in the Prussia that the nobles had made. He gave
vigorous expression to the creed of Prussian particularism.
Nationalism was the traditional patriotism of Prussians,
obeying an unfettered Crown ruling as it pleased through
a hereditary aristocracy. Liberalism would destroy the
historic Prussia, which must remain the Prussia of Frederick
the Great, whom Gerlach noted Bismarck had already
adopted as his model. In all these utterances there is no
recognition that the strength of Liberalism lay in its
mandate to represent forces within and without Prussia
that could not be refuted by the rubric and articles of the
crude conservatism of a caste, there is no appreciation
of the gravity and complexity of the German problem
or of Prussia's duty to Germany. The two impressive
characteristics in these speeches are the unmistakable
sincerity of the speaker's convictions and the undefinable
atmosphere of independence which can grow into leader-
ship. Bismarck spoke for himself, but he more than
voiced, and men felt it, his party. He was pointing the
way, and not merely tramping in the footsteps of others.
Well might the Liberals already call him the champion
of the Ultras; well might Leopold von Gerlach rejoice
that here was an ally and a disciple after his own heart.
The young Junker had made his mark. At his marriage
enthusiastic friends hailed him as a new Otto the Saxon,
a coming Otto the Great.
Allies and disciples of the old dispensation. were needed.
At Venice Frederick William iv. received Bismarck
travelling on his honeymoon. Sovereign and subject next
met after the Barricades in Berlin. Before the united
Diet could renew its rejected demands, the Revolution
of 1848 had swept over Germany and Europe.
? 2. The Junker Politician, 1848-1851
The astonishing period from the March days in Berlin
and Vienna - to the Convention of Olmiitz and the
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? 58
BISMARCK
restoration of the fallen Federal Constitution and Diet of
1815, provides a panorama overloaded with bewildering
and complicated events. The revolutionary spirit en-
graved her record with steel on hearts insurgent and
scorched with fire. In the evolution of Bismarck's per-
sonality and the principles of his statecraft ' 1848 ' closed
one chapter and opened another.
The main framework and background can be briefly
disentangled. The first phase lasted from March 10 to
November 1, during which Austria was crippled by con-
tinual riots and placed practically out of action. This
gave the simultaneous risings in Germany the upper
hand, and enabled the leaders of the Revolution to con-
centrate their efforts on the National Parliament at
Frankfurt, and to work through a national assembly in
Berlin for drastic reforms in Prussia. The fate of the
Revolution depended on the capacity of this movement
to make good its work before the Austrian government
could recover and challenge its supremacy. The National
Assembly met at Frankfurt on May 13, the Prussian
Constituent Assembly on May 22; but by the end of
June the revolution in Prague had been mastered, and on
November 1 Vienna was in the hands of Windischgratz,
and the Ministry of Schwarzenberg, a determined foe to
the Revolution, was set up.
A second phase began with November 1, and lasted
until April 28, 1849, in which Austria, aided by Prussia,
practically killed the Frankfurt programme. Hungary,
with the aid of Russia, was reduced; the battle of Novara
(March 23, 1849) virtually crushed the revolution against
Austria in Northern Italy; in Berlin the National As-
sembly, removed from the capital, was dissolved, and a
written Prussian Constitution, drafted by the Crown, was
proclaimed (December 5). This was a blow at the
Frankfurt Constitution-makers, whose success depended
on the acceptance by the German States of the national
unification, nearing completion at Frankfurt. The im-
position by the Emperor of a new constitution on Austria
(March 4, 1849) drove the Prussian stroke home. In
April Austria practically declared war on the Frankfurt
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 59
party. The Liberals had one chance left--to secure
Prussia and pit her in alliance with Liberal Germany
against Austria. The hereditary Imperial Crown of a
Germany unified on a Liberal basis, guaranteed by
the written constitution drawn up at Frankfurt, was
offered to Frederick William iv. The Prussian govern-
ment rejected the Frankfurt Constitution, and the King
definitely refused the Crown (April 25). The Liberal
Revolution had failed.
In the third phase, which lasted until October 5, 1850,
the interest concentrates on the attempt of Prussia to
make her own solution, an effort mainly influenced by
the policy of Radowitz. While Prussian troops were
suppressing the remnant of Republican irreconcilables
in Baden and the south, the Prussian government en-
deavoured to form a union of the four kingdoms of
Hanover, Saxony, Wiirttemberg, and Bavaria with the
petty states under Prussian leadership. The Union was
to have a joint Directory, a common Parliament, and
a constitution, to consist only of voluntary members,
and to establish a close understanding with Austria, ex-
cluded from the Germany thus unified. The surrender
of Vilagos (August 12) and of Venice (August 22) left
Austria now completely free to deal with the Germany
that would exclude her from all share in the Prussian
Union. The Frankfurt Liberals decided to support
the Prussian scheme, but by October 5 the four kingdoms,
influenced by Austria, had seceded from the League.
Austria had killed the original scheme of the Union.
Would and could Prussia, with the petty States, carry the
truncated scheme against the four kingdoms and Austria,
and establish a union of North Germany under her
leadership?
The fourth phase was closed by the Convention or
Punctation of Olmiitz (November 29, 1850). A Parlia-
ment of the Union met at Erfurt, approved a draft
Constitution, and adjourned (April 29, 1850). Austria
replied by demanding the revival of the old Diet. The
Electpr of Hesse-Cassel was at a deadlock with his sub-
jects; Hesse-Cassel professed to be a member of the
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? 6o
BISMARCK
Union, but the Elector appealed to the old Diet, and his
cause was supported by Austria, Bavaria and Wiirttemberg.
A Federal execution was ordered. Resistance by Prussia
meant war with A\istria and her allies in the Diet, on
behalf of Liberalism in Hesse-Cassel and the Erfurt
Union. Behind Austria stood the Tsar Nicholas 1. , the
spirit incarnate of legitimism and the counter-revolution.
The Prussian Court was divided. Many Prussian Con-
servatives, including Prince William, the heir to the
throne, were for war. Much as they disliked Liberalism,
their Prussian pride could not brook the humiliation of
surrender to Austria. The Austrian party at the Berlin
Court, however, only desired to destroy the Revolution
and to work with the cause of legitimism at Vienna. War
by Prussia in alliance with Liberalism meant civil war in
Germany, which must end either in the victory of the
Revolution or the destruction of Prussia. Radowitz's
resignation on November 3 proclaimed Prussia's refusal
to take up the challenge of Austria. The Convention of
Olmutz registered the abandonment of the Union and
the acceptance by Prussia of the Austrian ultimatum.
The Austrian School at the Prussian Court had vanquished
alike the conservative Prussian particularists and Liberalism
within and without Prussia.
The final phase ended on May 16, 1851. Austrian
proposals to modify the old Federal Constitution in her
favour failed. To the exile Metternich's joy, the old
Confederation was revived unaltered. The position had
swung back to that in February 1848, with one important
qualification. Prussia accepted a secret alliance with
Austria, by which in return for the maintenance of her
territorial integrity she guaranteed the whole, and not
merely the German part, of the Austrian Empire. The
triumph of Austrianism was complete. The attempt to
unify Germany through revolution and on the principles
of Liberalism had collapsed. Nationalism had collapsed
also. When Frederick vn. in 1848 succeeded to the
Danish throne, the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein
demanded joint admission to the Germanic Confederation.
The Duke of Augustenburg, who claimed to be the heir
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 61
to the Duchies, was supported by Prussia, whose troops
overran Schleswig. It looked as if the Duchies were to be
won for Germany; but Prussia (August 26) made the
truce of Malmo with Denmark. Next year, when the
Revolution had failed, the Danes compelled Prussia, un-
supported by the European Powers or by Austria, to with-
draw her troops. The Treaty of London of 1852, drawn
up by a European Conference, guaranteed the integrity
of the Danish Kingdom, provided for the succession to
the Danish Crown, and restored the status quo in the
Duchies. The attempt, which had the enthusiastic sup-
port of the Revolution to liberate 'unredeemed' Ger-
many from Danish control, and establish a German
democratic government in the Duchies, had ended
in a complete failure, for which Prussia was largely
responsible.
Throughout these three years Bismarck developed a
fiery energy. Fear was not a word to be found in his
dictionary; his will could dispose of an iron physique in
the prime of manhood. From the March days when he
scribbled a note to the King, urging him to stand firm,
he was always ready to organise resistance, or, if need be,
to head a coup <S? ? . tat. He expressed his views with the
brusque and vivid frankness which shocked and puzzled
the courts and diplomatists 'du vieux pantalon,' and was
a blow in the face of the Liberal benches. He was present
in the Marble Hall of the Palace at Potsdam on that grey
March evening in 1848 when Frederick William iv. , pale
and exhausted in mind and body, announced to the
assembled officers, waiting for the command of the War-
Lord to clear the rebel canaille from the streets of the
capital, the order for the withdrawal of the troops--a
capitulation to the Revolution. An angry clatter of half-
drawn swords thrust back into the scabbards, and a growl
of indignant mutiny, swept over the hall, ' such as a King
of Prussia in the midst of his officers had never heard
before and, I hope, will never hear again. ' Though he
had no part in the memorable Parliament of all Germany
in the Church of St. Paul at Frankfurt, Bismarck was a
member of the Prussian United Diet, of the Constituent
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? BISMARCK
Assembly, and the National Assembly at Berlin, and of the
Union Parliament at Erfurt.
He spoke often, and always
in uncompromising resistance to the Liberal programme.
He took part in the so-called 'Junker Parliament' of
August 1848--a conference of the Conservative Ultras
organised in a league for defence of king and country. He
was one of the group which founded and wrote for the
Kuuzzeitung, henceforward the leading organ of the
Conservative Party; throughout he remained in the
closest touch with the Gerlach Circle, the organisers of
the famous Camarilla, the unofficial secret ministry which
utilised the social position of its members and political
intrigues to undermine every minister tainted with
Liberalism, and to force the vacillating and impressionable
Frederick William iv. into obedience to the counter-
revolution. No member of the Conservative rank and
file worked harder than Bismarck to defeat the Revolution
of the Barricades, the Liberalism of Frankfurt, or the
Union policy of Radowitz. But he remained in the
rank and file. The efforts of the Camarilla to secure
office for him failed. Frederick William recognised the
unimpeachable loyalty of this Junker subject, but to have
given office to this 'red reactionary, smacking of blood,
only to be employed when the bayonet reigns without
reservation,' would have involved a breach with the
Moderates as well as with the Liberals. The King pro-
bably saw in Bismarck the representative of the men who
waged a truceless war on every effort to link the destinies
of Prussia with a Germany from which Austria was ex-
cluded. The influence of Radowitz was predominant
until Austria made it clear that the King of Prussia must
choose between war and surrender. It is not improbable
that Frederick William justly feared the influence of
Bismarck's resolute will on his own obstinate irresolution.
Nursing to the end the dream of a monarchical Prussia
which should gather in a free union under its eagle wings
the German kings, grand dukes, and landgraves, and build
a golden bridge to meet an imperial and purified Austria,
Frederick William shrank from the pitiless freelance,
master of the flouting. phrase that stuck, who amidst
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 63
courts and national assemblies superheated with sentiment
sought for realities and realities alone.
'1 was a terrible Junker in those days,' Bismarck re-
marked long after. '1 grant,' he said in 1847,' that I am
full of prejudices; I sucked them in with my mother's
milk and I cannot argue them away. ' It is a trifle, but a
significant one, that in 1848 he deliberately inserted in his
public and private letters the 'von' in front of the Bismarck
in his signature, which hitherto he had not used. As
Frederick William said at Cologne, ' There are kings still
in Germany, and I am one of them,' so Bismarck conveyed
that there were nobles still in Germany and he was one of
them. 'A terrible Junker,' yes, but not an unattractive
one, though he lacked the higher graciousness. His
superb physical vigour, his courage, his love of meat and
drink and tobacco, his power to drink and enjoy the cup of
life to the dregs, a buoyant geniality, and an amazing
frankness, extorted admiration even from his bitterest
opponents. The trenchancy of his principles was matched
by the unrestrained recklessness of his tongue. He re-
velled in his irresponsibility and the power to castigate
everything and every one he disliked. 'A handsome,
muscular, and truly noble figure,' is the description of an
eye-witness, 'in which is revealed in every feature the
chivalrous courage and also the refinement of the landed
aristocracy'; 'un gaillard avec le diable au corps,' summed
up another critic. He was, in fact, the Bismarck of
Kniephof and the United Diet, battling now in a Ber-
serker lust for the fray with Revolution and anti-Prussians.
To be young was good, to be strong was better, to have
your adversary in your power and crush him was best of all.
'Every courtesy,' he told the Liberal von Vincke at the
buffet in the interval of a heated debate, ' every courtesy
as far as the gallows,' and he meant it. The Minister-
President of the 'sixties, who could not sleep because he
was hating all night, could assuredly boil with passion
and disdain at thirty-two. Yet SchOnhausen and his
wife and the children now being born to him, were always
in his mind. He yearned for his manorial hearth, for the
sonatas of Beethoven, when the day's work in the field or
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BISMARCK
forest was over, and he could smoke his long pipe in the
corner by the great stove. At Erfurt in the spring of 1851
he would leave the Parliament to despatch tender inquiries
about measles or headaches, to stroll for hours through the
pine woods in the sunshine, watching the birds, noting
the cattle in the field, and reckoning the value of the
timber, or he smoking countless cigars staring up at the blue
sky and reflecting that a landowner's life was freer and far
more enjoyable than these accursed politics, made worse
by the nerveless ministers who ought to drink a bottle
of champagne at every meal to give them some courage
and grit.
His political creed was as lucid as the terms in which he
expressed it. It was idle, he said in April 1848, to regret
the March days. The monarchy had itself thrown the
earth on the coffin. He could have had some sympathy,
he remarked, with the Revolution if it had proposed to
plant the German flag on the cathedral of Strasburg; it
only proposed to fasten on the healthy body of Prussia
the Nessus shirt of Gallican Jacobinism. Similarly, the
Prussian Constitution of December 5 (limited as it was)
went further than he wished, but it was a free gift from
the Crown, and it must be accepted and worked because it
came from the Crown and not from the gutter. All at-
tempts to deduce from it principles contradictory to the un-
fettered prerogative of the sovereign were illegitimate, and
must be resisted. Two points he never tired of pressing:
first, the specific and unique character of the Prussian
State; secondly, its incompatibility with the Liberalism
which would dissolve the historic independence of
Prussia in a mongrel German unity. 'What has held us
together,' he said on September 6, 1849, 'is exactly our
specific Prussianism. It was the residue of the decried
Prussianism which survived the Revolution--I mean the
Prussian army, our Prussian treasure, the fruit of long
years of intelligent administration and the living instru-
ment that stands between the Prussian king and his
people. . . . That people from which this army is drawn,
and of which the army is the truest representative, has no
desire to see its Prussian monarchy drowned in the putrid
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 65
yeast of South German anarchy. . . . We all desire the
Prussian eagle to spread its guardian and governing wings
from the Memel to the Donnersberg, but free will we see
him, not fettered by a new Parliament at Regensburg, not
sheltering under the feathers of the levelling vulture from
Frankfurt. . . . Prussians we are and Prussians we will
remain. I know that I express in these words the creed
of the majority of my countrymen, and I hope to God we
shall remain Prussians long after this piece of paper has
been forgotten like a withered autumn leaf. ' A dozen
similar passages to the same effect could be quoted. Bis-
marck rejoiced over the rejection of the Imperial Crown
offered by the Frankfurt National Parliament.
'The phantoms,' he said, ' of the theorists at Frankfurt
have cost us in six months more blood, money and tears
than thirty-three years of despotism. . . . The Frankfurt
Crown may be very brilliant, but the gold which gives
reality to the brilliance must first be won by melting down
the Prussian Crown, and I have no confidence that the
recasting will fit the form of our Prussian Constitution.
My Prussian patriotism and so-called antediluvian point
of view are as precious to me as a refuge from the flood in
Noah's ark. '
, ' I fear,'"he exclaimed, ' the whimpering sentimentality
of our century, which discovers a martyr in every fanatical
rebel and in every discontented fighter at the barricades. '
And he stated his own theory of political government when
he said:--
'History provides us with the most brilliant and grand,
though not the most beneficial, phenomenon in a special
degree under the mark of absolutism, but we can find more
numerous examples of lasting political prosperity and
power in States subject to the influence of a hereditary
aristocracy . . . the brilliant memories of the German
Empire point to a powerful Imperial nobility. The
mediaeval prosperity of our cities began to wither at the
time when the patrician families went down before the
pressure of the Guilds . . . England trod a happier path;
she had no Richelieu who cut off the heads in which a
hereditary wisdom resides to an exceptional degree. The
B. E
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BISMARCK
character of the English Revolution is Freedom, of the
French, Equality . . . French Equality is the will-of-the-
wisp, daughter of Envy and Greed, pursued without
success by that richly gifted nation for sixty years through
blood and madness. Let us refuse to join in that pursuit
on the false supposition that it is popular. '
Radowitz's resignation and the collapse of his policy
filled Bismarck with such joy that he danced on his chair
round his room three times. The humiliating convention
of Olmiitz occasioned the most weighty and remarkable
speech he had yet made. Nothing was easier, he pointed
out, than to make war; but, with an indirect allusion to
Frederick the Great:--
'The one sound basis of a great Power which differen-
tiates it essentially from the petty State, is political egoism
and not romanticism, and it is unworthy of a great State
to fight for what is not connected with its interest. . . .
Woe to the statesman who at this time has not sought a
reason for going to war which after the war will no less
stand the test. '
He rejected the idea that honour required Prussia ' to
play the Don Quixote all over Germany on behalf of
sickly demagogues, who imagined their local constitutions
in danger. ' And then he came to close grips with his real
gravamen against the whole policy of the Erfurt Union.
The Union involved nothing less than the destruction
of Prussia's independence, not by the princes, but by the
parliaments of the petty States. A war by Prussia to main-
tain the Union could only recall to his mind the English-
man who overpowered the sentinel in order that he might
vindicate the right of every free Briton to commit suicide
in the sentry-box.
In this speech Bismarck, for all its lucid trenchancy of
expression, was groping his way to settled principles of
foreign policy. It was not the interest of Prussia to fight
'as the shameful ally of democracy' against Austria: she
could attain her objects by co-operation with, not by
opposition to, Austria, and the identity of Prussian and
Austrian interests made war unjustifiable in 1850. Bis-
marck was also answering in advance the critics who have
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 67
urged that twenty years later it was this same Bismarck
who practically carried out Radowitz's programme--the
unification of North Germany under Prussia's presidency
--and only carried it out at the price Radowitz was not
allowed to pay in 1850, war with Austria and her allies,
the German kingdoms. The criticism ignores the deep-
seated grounds of Bismarck's opposition to Radowitz's
policy. In 1850, Prussia's one possible ally was Liberalism
in Germany: a Prussian victory would be not a victory
for Prussia's independence and position as a great state,
but for Liberalism. The Liberals, not Prussia, would give
the law to Prussia and Germany. But war was only a
continuance of policy--a policy based on specific Prussian
interests--to enable Prussia to establish the relations on
which she wished to live in peace with her neighbours and
rivals. The last thing that the Bismarck of 1850 or of.
1866 desired or regarded as a real Prussian interest, was
the triumph of Liberalism. Moreover, in 1850 Radowitz,
in Bismarck's judgment, miscalculated. Behind Austria
and her German allies stood the sinister strength of a
Russia which had struck down Hungary, and was about to
impose its will in Schleswig-Holstein. Across the Rhine
was a revolutionary France, ready to intervene. In 1866
France's neutrality had been secured, a crippled Russia
was benevolently neutral, Italy was Prussia's ally. A vic-
torious Prussia would annex Schleswig-Holstein and more.
In brief, between the statecraft of Radowitz and that of
Bismarck there was no identity in temper, methods,
principles, or aims. The two men interpreted the interest
of Prussia and of Germany as differently as two opposed
minds could.
In 1850, his whole argument hinged on the contention
that the Union of Erfurt was a false step in the wrong
direction, and rested on the fundamental and explicit
assumption that the historic Prussia could secure 'her
interests and her honour' by the loyal co-operation of
Austria and Prussia. The words were Bismarck's, but the
voice was the voice of the Gerlachs and the cosmopolitan
Conservatives who saw in a renewed Holy Alliance with
Austria the salvation of Prussia and the defeat of the
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BISMARCK
Revolution. In 1850 ' the terrible Junker ' had not pene-
trated to the heart either of Germany or of Austria, nor had
he defined for himself, except in a superficial and conven-
tional way, ' the interest, the egoism' which ought to be
the sole basis of Prussian policy. But, as yet, he was not
aware that his knowledge was very limited and his inter-
pretation shallow and retarding.
Generally for Germany, the restoration of the old Diet
in 1851 registered two decisive defeats--the defeat of the
Revolution, and of Prussia. Liberalism in alliance with
Nationalism set out, through revolution, to achieve uni-
fication, and to create a truly federal organisation with
democratic and responsible parliamentary government,
under an imperial and limited monarchy, the whole de-
fined and embodied in a written constitution. The
Liberal majority in the National Assembly at Frankfurt had
rejected the programme of Radical Republicanism. It had
also rejected the programme of the Great German Party
(Gross-Deutschland). The German provinces of Austria,
included in the old Bund, were excluded. The organi-
sation of the excluded Austria was left to Austria, and the
political and fiscal relations between the new German
Empire (KleinrDeutschland) and the reconstituted Austrian
Empire were reserved for later diplomatic arrangements.
But the authors of the Constitution of 1848 contemplated
not merely a political alliance, but a spiritual and moral
union wider and deeper than the formal bargain of a
treaty--the creation of a central Germanic Europe, finding
its expression in the material framework of constitutional
and economic organisation, and guaranteed by a com-
munity of purpose in the intellectual and political life of
two self-governing and democratic empires.
This comprehensive scheme, the work of high-minded
and able men, was a noble and imaginative effort in con-
structive statesmanship, which bears the stamp of the
idealism and an inspiring belief in the capacities of a race
for achieving salvation when men build on the uplands,
and not the lowlands, of human endeavour. What con-
structive statesmanship, indeed, has ever achieved per-
manent results on the theory that the spiritual and in-
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? THE JUNKER POLITICIAN 69
tellectual consciousness of nationhood can be satisfied or
stifled by economic and material well-being alone? Had
the unification of 1848 been given a fair trial it would
have moulded the German mind and directed German
destinies and ambitions into paths of self-development
of incalculable benefit to Germany and the world.
Its failure was a tragedy for German and European
civilisation.
That failure is commonly ascribed to the academic
amateurism of its authors, who wasted their time in thresh-
ing out fundamental rights when apparently they should
have been cutting off heads or shooting down opposition,
or lynching the King of Prussia. Such criticism is really
amateur, Philistine, and ignorant of what revolution by
Liberal methods from an old to a new system implies. As
if the task of devising a federal unification of the Germany
of 1848 and of solving the German problem could have
been accomplished by any brain or any action in a few
weeks, least of all by force.
In 1866, Bismarck with the experience of 1848 and
twenty years of earnest constructive thought by many
brains at his disposal, with Austria and her German allies
prostrate, with a Prussian monarch wholly on his side and
a victorious Prussian army at his beck and call, took ten
months to work out, impose and bring into operation a
unification, not of all Germany, but of the north alone--
and Bismarck had been preparing for the task for four
unrelenting years.
The remarkable feature of 1848, in reality, was the
rapidity with which in the smoke and dust of a bewildering
revolution the liberal majority hammered out by argument
and under the conditions of government by public meeting,
a scheme of unification that probed deeper and was more
complete than the constitution of 1867. The men who
could accomplish that, in spite of their lack of training in
public affairs, were not unfitted to be leaders and teachers
in self-government, or to make the policy and control the
destinies of a great nation.
What they did lack was an army and the executive
organs of government, and before they could create them
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BISMARCK
they were crushed not by Germany, nor the princes, but
by Russia and Austria--the two foreign States to which
Liberalism and Nationalism, as Germans understood them,
were anathema. The hero of the reaction was Nicholas i. ,
without whose aid Schwarzenberg and Windischgratz
could not have mastered Prague and Vienna, nor dictated
the surrenders of Vilagos, Olmiitz, and Novara. Liberal-
ism went down. Radical Republicanism does not appear
again as a force to be reckoned with, except perhaps in
sporadic and convulsive efforts in Wurttemberg. But
Liberalism was not killed, neither was its twin, Nationalism.
The defeat and failure of Prussia--also at the hands of
Russia and Austria--was the second outstanding fact in
1851. Prussia, unlike the Liberals of Frankfurt, had both
an army and executive organs of government. Unlike
Austria and almost every other German State, she had not
been mastered by the Revolution. The strength of the
monarchy and the grip of the royal autocracy on the army
and the governing class were as convincingly revealed, as
after the disaster of Jena. But from the March Days until
Olmiitz Prussia was hopelessly divided. The Liberals
under G. von Vincke, the Moderate Conservatives under
Brandenburg, the Constitutionalists led by Radowitz.
the Junker Camarilla, under the Gerlachs, the Militarists
thirsting for a coup d'Etat in the manner of Schwarzenberg,
Windischgratz and Haynau, the pure Particularists exem-
plified in Prince William, ' the Cartridge Prince,' the heir
to the throne, to whom first and foremost Prussia was a
Grossmacht, which must fight for honour and independence,
the Poles in Prussian Poland crying out for national inde-
pendence, the clericals from the Rhenish districts to whom
the secular omnipotence of the autocracy was as dangerous
as the secular atheism of the Revolution, and the Com-
munists of the Vorwarts, founded by Karl Marx from
Prussian Trier and Engels from Prussian Barmen--the
men who created both the socialism of Lassalle and Bebel
--all these whirled in vortices of varying strength round
the King, who could have led if he could have made up his
mind, or could have been deprived of a mind to make up
But Frederick William persistently refused either to frame
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