Otto von Bismarck

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1889, Otto von Bismarck was recorded on an Edison phonograph, quoting the opening verse of La Marseillaise among other lines. That recording is the only known capture of his voice. One biographer argues that he chose the French song to mock the French, nineteen years after he had beaten them in war.

  The man behind that voice was born the son of a country landowner and became known across Europe as the Iron Chancellor. He is remembered above all as the figure who oversaw the unification of Germany.

  Three questions run through his story. How did a provincial squire, whom many took for a backwoods type, end up reshaping the map of Europe? Why did a statesman who went to war three times in a few years spend two decades working to keep the peace? And why would a devoted monarchist, hostile to socialists, build a system of insurance for ordinary workers? The answers begin on a family estate west of Berlin.

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• 2. Junker Boyhood

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  Schönhausen, a noble family estate west of Berlin in Prussian Saxony, is where Otto von Bismarck was born on the 1st of April 1815. His father, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Bismarck, was a Junker landowner of Swabian descent and a former Prussian officer. His mother, Wilhelmine Luise Mencken, was the well-educated daughter of a senior government official in Berlin, from a family of civil servants and academics.

  In 1816 the family moved to Kniephof, an estate in Farther Pomerania, northeast of Stettin. Today the estate is Konarzewo and the city is Szczecin, both in Poland. Bismarck spent a rural childhood there. The family owned land but was not rich, because his father's weak farming skills reduced their earnings. Bismarck himself never held significant wealth before unification. He had an older brother, Bernhard, born in 1810, and a younger sister, Malwine, born in 1827.

  Bismarck knew English, French, Italian, Polish and Russian, yet others took him for a typical backwoods Junker. He encouraged that image by wearing military uniforms. Behind it stood a well-educated, cosmopolitan man with a gift for conversation.

  Johann Ernst Plamann's elementary school came first, followed by the Friedrich-Wilhelm and Graues Kloster secondary schools. From 1832 to 1833 Bismarck studied law at the University of Göttingen, where he belonged to the Corps Hannovera. He then enrolled at the University of Berlin from 1833 to 1835. In 1838, while stationed as an army reservist in Greifswald, he studied agriculture at the university there.

  At Göttingen, Bismarck befriended an American student named John Lothrop Motley, who later became an eminent historian and diplomat. In 1839 Motley published a novel about German university life, Morton's Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial. It describes Bismarck as a reckless, dashing eccentric, and also as an extremely gifted and charming young man.

  Bismarck hoped to become a diplomat, but he began practical training as a lawyer in Aachen and Potsdam. He soon resigned. Earlier he had put his career at risk by taking unauthorised leave to chase two English girls. The first was Laura Russell, a niece of the Duke of Cleveland. The second was Isabella Loraine-Smith, daughter of a wealthy clergyman.

  In 1838 he began a shortened compulsory service in the Prussian Army, first as a one-year volunteer and then as an officer in the Landwehr, the reserve. When his mother died, he returned in his mid-twenties to run the family estates at Schönhausen.

  Around the age of thirty, Bismarck formed an intense friendship with Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff, who had just married his friend Moritz von Blanckenburg. A month after Marie died, he wrote to ask for the hand of her cousin, the noblewoman Johanna von Puttkamer. They married at Alt-Kolziglow, now Kołczygłowy, on the 28th of July 1847. Three children followed: Marie in 1847, Herbert in 1849 and Wilhelm in 1852.

  Johanna was shy, retiring and deeply religious, though she became famous in later life for her sharp tongue. Both of her sons would serve as officers in the Prussian cavalry when war with France came in 1870.

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• 3. Reactionary Apprentice

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  In 1847, at the age of thirty-two, Bismarck was chosen for the Vereinigter Landtag, the newly created Prussian legislature. Two brothers, Ernst Ludwig and Leopold von Gerlach, arranged his selection. They were Pietist Lutherans who led an ultra-conservative faction nicknamed the Kreuzzeitung. The name came from their newspaper, the Neue Preußische Zeitung, which carried an Iron Cross on its cover. In the chamber Bismarck gained a reputation as a royalist reactionary with a gift for stinging rhetoric. He openly argued that the monarch ruled by divine right.

  Revolution reached Prussia in March 1848, one of many uprisings across Europe that year, and it overwhelmed King Frederick William IV. The king at first leaned toward using the army. In the end he refused to leave Berlin for the safety of military headquarters at Potsdam. Bismarck later recorded a "rattling of sabres in their scabbards" among Prussian officers when they learned the king would not crush the revolt by force.

  The king then offered the liberals a string of concessions. He wore the black-red-gold revolutionary colours, which appear on the flag of today's Germany. He promised a constitution, agreed that Prussia and the other German states should merge into one nation-state, and named a liberal, Gottfried Ludolf Camphausen, as Minister President.

  Bismarck had first tried to rouse the peasants of his own estate into an army to march on Berlin in the king's name. He travelled to the capital in disguise to offer his services. Instead he was told to make himself useful by arranging food supplies for the army from his estates.

  Prince Wilhelm, the king's brother, had fled to England. Bismarck approached Wilhelm's wife, Augusta, and urged her to place their teenage son Frederick William on the throne in the king's place. Augusta would have none of it and detested Bismarck from then on. He later helped repair the working relationship between Wilhelm and the king.

  By the end of 1848 the liberal movement had collapsed in internal fighting. The conservatives regrouped and retook Berlin. They formed an inner group of advisers around the king, including the Gerlach brothers, known as the Camarilla. A constitution was granted, but it fell far short of what the revolutionaries had demanded.

  In 1849 Bismarck was elected to the Landtag. At this stage he opposed German unification, arguing that Prussia would lose its independence in the process. He accepted a place as one of Prussia's representatives at the Erfurt Parliament, an assembly of German states discussing a union, only so that he could oppose its proposals more effectively. The assembly failed because Prussia and Austria, the two most important German states, did not support it.

  In September 1850, after the dispute known as the Hesse Crisis, Austria forced Prussia to back down in the Punctation of Olmütz, with Russian support. A plan for unification under Prussian leadership, proposed by Foreign Minister Joseph von Radowitz, was dropped.

  In 1851 Frederick William IV appointed Bismarck as Prussia's envoy to the Diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt. He gave up his seat in the Landtag, though a few years later he was appointed to the Prussian House of Lords. In Frankfurt he fought a battle of wills with the Austrian representative, Count Friedrich von Thun und Hohenstein. When Thun claimed the privilege of smoking and removing his jacket during meetings, Bismarck copied him to insist on equal treatment.

  A separate altercation in the chamber with Georg von Vincke led to a duel, with Carl von Bodelschwingh acting as an impartial party. Nobody was injured.

  Bismarck's eight years in Frankfurt changed his politics. His long memoranda to superiors in Berlin trace the shift. Away from his ultraconservative Prussian friends, he grew less reactionary and more pragmatic. He decided that Prussia needed allies among the other German states to counter Austria's newly restored influence. He came to believe that conservatives like himself had to lead the creation of a unified nation or be eclipsed. He also judged that middle-class liberals wanted unity more than they wanted to break the grip of traditional forces on society.

  He worked to keep Russia friendly and to hold a working relationship with Napoleon III's France. That horrified his friends the Gerlachs, but it was needed to threaten Austria and to stop France from allying with Russia. In a famous letter to Leopold von Gerlach, he called it foolish to play chess after putting 16 of the 64 squares out of bounds. The remark later turned ironic, because after 1871 France became Germany's permanent enemy. In the 1890s it allied with Russia against Germany.

  The Crimean War of the mid-1850s alarmed him. Austria sided with Britain and France against Russia, and Prussia was almost left out of the peace talks in Paris, where Russia regained access to the Black Sea. That near exclusion, much to his chagrin, would still be shaping his choices decades later.

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• 4. Iron and Blood

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  In October 1857, Frederick William IV suffered a paralysing stroke, and his brother Wilhelm took over the government as Regent. Wilhelm seemed a moderate. His friendship with liberal Britain was symbolised by his son Frederick William's recent marriage to Queen Victoria's eldest daughter. In a period he called the "New Era", he brought in moderate conservative ministers known as the Wochenblatt, after their newspaper.

  The Regent soon replaced Bismarck in Frankfurt and made him ambassador to the Russian Empire. In theory this was a promotion. In practice Bismarck was sidelined from events in Germany. He watched without power as France drove Austria out of Lombardy in the Italian War of 1859.

  He proposed that Prussia exploit Austria's weakness to move its frontiers "as far south as Lake Constance". Instead, Prussia mobilised troops in the Rhineland to deter further French advances into Venetia.

  Bismarck stayed in St Petersburg for four years. During that time he almost lost his leg to botched medical treatment. He also met again Prince Alexander Gorchakov, who had represented Russia in Frankfurt in the early 1850s and would become his adversary.

  The Regent appointed Helmuth von Moltke as Chief of Staff of the Prussian Army and Albrecht von Roon as Minister of War, with the task of reorganising the army. Over the next twelve years Bismarck, Moltke and Roon transformed Prussia. Roon kept Bismarck well informed from afar and became a lasting friend and political ally.

  In May 1862 Bismarck was sent to Paris as ambassador to France, and he visited England that summer. These trips let him take the measure of several adversaries. They were Napoleon III in France and, in Britain, Prime Minister Palmerston, Foreign Secretary Earl Russell and the Conservative politician Benjamin Disraeli.

  Wilhelm became King of Prussia on his brother's death in 1861, and he often clashed with an increasingly liberal Landtag. In 1862 the legislature refused to authorise funds for a proposed reorganisation of the army. The king's ministers could not win the votes, and he would not give way. Wilhelm threatened to abdicate in favour of Crown Prince Frederick William, who opposed that step. The crown prince believed Bismarck was the only politician able to handle the crisis.

  Wilhelm hesitated, because Bismarck demanded unfettered control over foreign affairs. In September 1862 the House of Representatives overwhelmingly rejected the budget. On Roon's advice, Wilhelm was persuaded to recall Bismarck. On the 23rd of September 1862 he appointed him Minister President and Foreign Minister.

  Bismarck met distrust from the king and the crown prince, and loathing from Queen Augusta. Even so, he soon gained a powerful hold over the king through force of personality and persuasion.

  On the 30th of September 1862, Bismarck addressed the Budget Committee of the Prussian Chamber of Deputies. He said Prussia must gather and hold its power for a favourable moment that had already slipped by several times. He judged its borders under the Vienna treaties unfavourable for a healthy state. The great questions of the time, he declared, would be settled not by speeches and majority votes but by "iron and blood". He called reliance on speeches the great mistake of 1848 and 1849.

  That mistake referred to the Frankfurt Parliament. In April 1849 it offered the title of Emperor to King Frederick William IV. He feared opposition from the other German princes and military intervention by Austria and Russia, so he refused. The German liberals had failed.

  Bismarck was determined to keep royal supremacy by ending the budget deadlock in the king's favour, even by extra-legal means. The constitution said a budget could pass only when king and legislature agreed. Bismarck argued it was silent on what happens if they do not, calling this a "legal loophole". He used the previous year's budget to keep the government running. On the basis of the 1861 budget, taxes were collected for four years.

  The quarrel deepened after the Alvensleben Convention of 1863. The House of Representatives resolved that it could no longer reach terms with Bismarck. The king answered by dissolving the Landtag, accusing it of seeking unconstitutional control over a ministry that, under the constitution, answered only to him.

  Bismarck then issued an edict restricting freedom of the press, which even the crown prince opposed in public. He remained largely unpopular. In the elections of October 1863, a liberal coalition led by the Progress Party won over two-thirds of the seats. The House repeatedly called for his dismissal, but the king backed him, fearing that a liberal would take his place.

  Within weeks, the death of the King of Denmark would open a crisis beyond Prussia's borders.

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• 5. Three Wars

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  Bismarck, Roon and Moltke each held a separate task. Bismarck handled diplomacy, Roon reorganised the army, and Moltke devised the military strategy. Before the 1860s, Germany was a multitude of principalities loosely bound together in the German Confederation. Bismarck used both diplomacy and the Prussian military to unify it, excluding Austria. This made Prussia the dominant part of the new Germany, but it also ensured the country stayed authoritarian rather than becoming a liberal parliamentary democracy.

  King Frederick VII of Denmark died in November 1863, and the succession to the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein was disputed. Christian IX, Frederick's heir as king, claimed them, and so did a Danish duke, Frederick von Augustenburg. Prussian public opinion favoured Augustenburg, since Holstein and southern Schleswig were mainly German-speaking.

  Bismarck took an unpopular line. He insisted that under the London Protocol, signed a decade earlier, the territories belonged legally to the Danish monarch. Even so, he denounced Christian's decision to annex Schleswig outright. With Austrian support he issued an ultimatum demanding that Schleswig return to its former status. Denmark refused, Austria and Prussia invaded, and the Second Schleswig War began. Denmark was forced to give up its claim to both duchies.

  Augustenburg briefly seemed the winner. Bismarck removed him by making unworkable demands, including Prussian control over the duchies' army and navy. The Diet of the German Confederation was meant to decide their fate. Bismarck instead induced Austria to sign the Gastein Convention on the 20th of August 1865, giving Schleswig to Prussia and Holstein to Austria. That year he received the title Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen.

  In 1866, Austria went back on the agreement and demanded that the Diet settle the question. Bismarck used this as an excuse for war, accusing Austria of violating the Gastein Convention, and sent Prussian troops into Holstein. Austria called on other German states for help, and the Austro-Prussian War began.

  Roon's reorganisation had made the Prussian army nearly equal in numbers to Austria's. Moltke's strategic skill let it fight battles it could win. Bismarck had also made a secret alliance with Italy, which wanted Austrian-held Veneto. Italy's entry forced Austria to divide its forces.

  As the war began, a German radical named Ferdinand Cohen-Blind shot at Bismarck five times at close range in Berlin. Bismarck suffered only minor injuries. Cohen-Blind later killed himself in custody.

  The war lasted seven weeks. Austria had a seemingly powerful army, allied with most of the north German states and all of the south German states. Even so, Prussia won the decisive Battle of Königgrätz. The king and his generals wanted to press on, conquer Bohemia and march to Vienna.

  Bismarck feared that Prussia's luck might turn or that France might intervene for Austria. He enlisted Crown Prince Frederick Wilhelm, who had opposed the war but commanded one of the Prussian armies at Königgrätz, to dissuade his father after stormy arguments. Bismarck insisted on a "soft peace", with no annexations and no victory parades, so that friendly relations with Austria could be restored quickly.

  He then replaced the German Confederation with the North German Confederation, which tied the smaller northern states to Prussia and left Austria out. In its Bundesrat, Prussia held only 17 of 43 seats, though it was larger than the other 21 states combined. Bismarck could still steer proceedings through alliances with the smaller states.

  Historian Jonathan Steinberg says the scale of the triumph cannot be exaggerated. Bismarck had transformed the European order without commanding an army, leading a large party, or holding a majority in parliament. He did it in the face of almost universal hostility. In August 1866, according to Steinberg, he punched his fist on his desk and cried "I have beaten them all! All!"

  Prussia's victory over Austria sharpened tension with France. Emperor Napoleon III had hoped for territory in Belgium and on the left bank of the Rhine as compensation for staying out of the war. The quick result disappointed him. The opposition politician Adolphe Thiers claimed that France, not Austria, had really been defeated at Königgrätz.

  Bismarck did not avoid war with France, though he had reasons to fear it. He worried that a vengeful Austria would ally with the French. He also worried that the Russian army would help France to keep a balance of power. Yet he believed the German states would unite behind the King of Prussia if they saw France as the aggressor. So he kept Napoleon III tangled in intrigues over possible gains in Luxembourg or Belgium. France gained nothing, but it came to look greedy and untrustworthy.

  A pretext arrived in 1870, when Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was offered the Spanish throne, vacant since a revolution in 1868. France pressured Leopold into withdrawing. Not satisfied, Paris demanded that Wilhelm, as head of the House of Hohenzollern, promise that no Hohenzollern would ever seek the Spanish crown again.

  Bismarck then published the Ems Dispatch, a carefully edited account of a conversation between King Wilhelm and the French ambassador, Count Benedetti. The editing made each nation feel its ambassador had been slighted and ridiculed, which inflamed popular sentiment on both sides. The historian Langer argues the episode played only a minor part in causing the war.

  In his Memoirs, Bismarck wrote that he had no doubt a Franco-German war must come before a united Germany could be built. He felt confident that France was unprepared to face Germany's larger forces and wrote, "If the French fight us alone they are lost". He was also sure France would find no allies, since a victorious France would endanger everybody while Prussia endangered nobody. "That is our strong point," he added.

  France mobilised and declared war on the 19th of July 1870. The German states saw France as the aggressor and, swept up in patriotic zeal, rallied to Prussia with troops. Moltke, as Chief of Staff, won victory after victory. All the major battles fell between the 7th of August and the 1st of September. Both French armies were captured, one at Sedan and one at Metz after a siege of some weeks.

  Napoleon III was taken prisoner at Sedan. He was held in Germany for a time in case Bismarck needed him to head the French regime, and he later died in exile in England in 1873. The war dragged on with a siege of Paris. The new French republican regime tried without success to relieve the city with hastily assembled armies, and partisan warfare grew increasingly bitter.

  Bismarck moved at once to secure unification. He negotiated with representatives of the southern German states and offered special concessions. The talks succeeded, and patriotic feeling overwhelmed what opposition remained. On the 18th of January 1871, as the war entered its final phase, Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at the Château de Versailles.

  The new empire was a federation of 25 constituent states, from kingdoms to free cities, each keeping some autonomy. The King of Prussia, as emperor, was only first among equals, in the Latin phrase primus inter pares. He did preside over the Bundesrat, which discussed policy presented by the Chancellor, whom he appointed. France also had to pay an indemnity, calculated by population as the precise equivalent of what Napoleon I had imposed on Prussia in 1807.

  Historians debate whether Bismarck had a master plan to enlarge the North German Confederation of 1866 or simply wanted to expand Prussian power. Many factors beyond his Realpolitik reshaped the relationships among German states. Reaction to Danish and French nationalism gave Germans something to rally against. Prussia's military successes in three regional wars produced pride that politicians could harness. They also echoed the shared memory of the War of Liberation of 1813-1814.

  By building a Germany without Austria, the settlement of 1871 at least temporarily solved the problem of dualism. Robert K. Massie notes that Bismarck's popular image was gruff and militaristic, while his real tool was aggressive, ruthless diplomacy. Steinberg counts eight and a half years from his appointment to the empire. He writes that when Bismarck returned to Berlin in March 1871, he had become immortal.

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• 6. Enemies Within

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  A former hotel at Friedrichsruh, near Hamburg, became Bismarck's estate after he bought it in 1871. That year he was raised to the rank of Fürst, or Prince, and promoted to lieutenant-general. He was also appointed first Imperial Chancellor, the Reichskanzler. He kept his Prussian offices, including Minister President and Foreign Minister, so he held nearly complete control over domestic and foreign policy.

  The Prussian post was briefly separated from the chancellorship in 1873, when Albrecht von Roon took it. Roon resigned within the year because of ill health, and Bismarck took the office back.

  In 1871, Bismarck launched an anti-Catholic campaign in Prussia known as the Kulturkampf, or culture struggle. It was partly driven by his fear that Pius IX and his successors would use papal infallibility to pursue international political power. Prussia's population had grown greatly in the 1860s and was now one-third Catholic. Bismarck also worried about the Catholic Centre Party, organised in 1870.

  In May 1872 he tried to persuade other European governments to agree beforehand on unsuitable candidates for future papal conclaves. Their national cardinals would then be instructed to vote accordingly. The project went nowhere.

  Bismarck pressed on. Backed by the anticlerical National Liberal Party, his chief ally in the Reichstag, he abolished the Catholic Department of the Prussian Ministry of Culture. That left Catholics without a voice in high circles. In 1872 the Jesuits were expelled from Germany. Laws passed in 1873 allowed the Prussian government to supervise the education of Catholic clergy and curtailed the Church's disciplinary powers. All Prussian bishops and many priests were imprisoned or exiled. In 1875, civil ceremonies became required for weddings, whereas church weddings had previously been recognised by the state.

  The British ambassador Odo Russell reported to London in October 1872 that the plan was backfiring. German bishops who had been politically powerless had become powerful leaders and eager defenders of Rome, united, disciplined and thirsting for martyrdom. Catholics organised and strengthened the Centre Party.

  Steinberg links the campaign to Bismarck's temper and his suspicion that secret forces were undermining his life's work. He quotes Odo Russell's letter to his mother: "The demonic is stronger in him than in any man I know." Opponents, friends and subordinates all described a kind of uncanny personal power.

  Bismarck, a devout pietistic Protestant, grew alarmed that secularists and socialists were using the Kulturkampf to attack all religion. In 1878 he abandoned it to preserve his remaining political capital, since he now needed Centre Party votes. Pius IX died that year. His successor, the more pragmatic Leo XIII, negotiated away most of the anti-Catholic laws but kept control of choosing bishops. Catholics never forgot the culture war and preached solidarity in case it ever resumed.

  In 1873 Germany, much of Europe and America entered the Long Depression, called the Gründerkrise in Germany. It was the first downturn since industrial growth surged in the 1850s. To help faltering industries, Bismarck abandoned free trade and set protectionist import tariffs. That alienated the National Liberals, who demanded free trade. The Kulturkampf had also turned opinion against the party that supported it, and Bismarck used the moment to distance himself.

  By 1879 his close ties with the National Liberals had all but ended. He returned to the conservative factions, including the Centre Party. That year he won their support with tariffs protecting German agriculture and industry from foreign competitors.

  Imperial and provincial bureaucracies also tried to Germanise the empire's national minorities near its borders. They were the Danes in the north, the Francophones in the west and the Poles in the east. Bismarck was especially hostile toward the Poles, an attitude rooted in Prussian history. He never had a Pole among the peasants on his estates. What he denounced from personal experience were the educated Polish middle class and revolutionaries.

  In a private letter to his sister in 1861 he urged hammering the Poles until they despaired of living. He likened them to wolves that people shoot when they can. Later that year he wrote more guardedly to Prussia's foreign minister. Each success of the Polish national movement, he said, was a defeat for Prussia, to be fought by the rules of war and not of civil justice.

  In 1878, two failed assassination attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I gave Bismarck an opening against the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany, a predecessor of today's Social Democratic Party. He blamed the party without support. The Reichstag passed the Anti-Socialist Laws, which banned socialist organisations and meetings and outlawed trade unions. They also closed newspapers and prohibited socialist literature. Over the twelve-year life of the laws, some 330 workers' organisations were banned.

  The laws left electoral rules and parliamentary immunity untouched. Men with social democratic backgrounds could still run as individuals and take part in the Reichstag and the state parliaments.

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• 7. Chessboard Diplomacy

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  Historian Eric Hobsbawm called Bismarck the undisputed world champion at multilateral diplomatic chess for almost twenty years after 1871. One secret of his success was a careful, in-depth study of every other state's national interest. That kept him from misunderstandings. More importantly, it helped him find points where another state's interest matched Germany's, so that a deal could benefit both.

  Steinberg says this approach required no emotional commitment to any actor. Bismarck held multiple possible moves by his opponents in his head and enjoyed the game. In foreign affairs, unlike at home, he never lost his temper and rarely felt ill or sleepless.

  Europe entered a period of peace in 1871 after fifteen years of warfare in the Crimea, Germany and France. The army under Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder was a model of professionalism that fought no wars. The Imperial German Navy stayed small. A man with a reputation as a war-maker changed overnight into a peacemaker.

  By 1878, spokesmen for both the Liberals and Conservatives in Britain hailed him as a champion of European peace. The British diplomatic historian Taylor judged him an honest broker whose alliances compelled every power onto a peaceful course. Paul Knaplund wrote that by the 1880s Bismarck was the umpire in all serious diplomatic disputes. Matters as varied as Balkan boundaries, Egypt's finances, the war between France and China and the partition of Africa were referred to Berlin.

  Queen Victoria disagreed. In a letter of the 8th of June 1885, she called him overbearing, violent, grasping and unprincipled. She also described him as a terrible man who was becoming like the first Napoleon.

  France was Bismarck's main problem. The decision to take Alsace and much of Lorraine in 1871 came from public opinion, which wanted to humiliate France, and from an army that wanted more defensible frontiers. Bismarck reluctantly gave in. He calculated that the French would never forgive him, so he might as well take the provinces.

  Historians call it his main mistake. Theodore Zeldin writes that revenge and the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine became a principal object of French policy for the next forty years. Bismarck's answer was to make France a pariah. He encouraged royalty to ridicule its new republican status and built alliances with the other major powers to keep it isolated.

  Between 1873 and 1877, Germany repeatedly manipulated the internal affairs of France's neighbours. Bismarck pressed Belgium, Spain and Italy to elect liberal, anticlerical governments. He hoped to promote republicanism in France by isolating the clerical-monarchist regime of President Patrice de MacMahon.

  The bullying nearly went too far in mid-1875. A Berlin newspaper close to the government, the Post, published an editorial titled "Krieg-in-Sicht", or "War in Sight". It reflected alarm among influential Germans at France's rapid recovery and its plan to enlarge its army, along with talk of a preventive war. Bismarck denied knowing of the article in advance, but he certainly knew of the talk. Britain and Russia warned that they would not tolerate such a war, and the crisis blew over. It was a rare moment when he was outmanoeuvred, and he learned to weigh the fear his bullying caused among neighbours.

  Bismarck feared a hostile combination of Austria-Hungary, France and Russia. If two of them allied, the third would ally with Germany only if Germany conceded excessive demands. So he aimed to ally with two of the three.

  In 1873 he formed the League of the Three Emperors, the Dreikaiserbund, linking Wilhelm, Tsar Alexander II of Russia and Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria-Hungary. The Balkans posed a harder problem. His solution was to give Austria-Hungary predominance in the western areas and Russia in the eastern ones. That system collapsed in 1887.

  A feud had begun in 1872 with Count Harry von Arnim, the imperial ambassador to France. Arnim saw himself as a rival for the chancellorship and took sensitive records from embassy files in Paris to support his case. He was accused of misappropriating official documents, tried and convicted, and he fled into exile, where he died. After that, nobody openly challenged Bismarck on foreign policy until his resignation.

  After Russia's victory over the Ottoman Empire in 1877-1878, Bismarck helped negotiate a settlement at the Congress of Berlin. The Treaty of Berlin revised the earlier Treaty of San Stefano and shrank the new Principality of Bulgaria, then pro-Russian. Foreign Minister Gorchakov denounced Bismarck for compromising his nation's victory. Some in the German military clamoured for a preemptive war with Russia, but Bismarck refused: "Preemptive war is like committing suicide for fear of death."

  Bismarck also saw that Russia and Britain both prized control of central Asia, a rivalry nicknamed the Great Game. Germany had no direct stake, yet its dominance in Europe grew when Russian troops were based far from Germany. For two decades he manoeuvred to help the British and force the Russians to commit more soldiers to Asia.

  In 1879 Bismarck negotiated the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary, in which each guaranteed the other against Russian attack. In 1882 he added the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Italy. Italy and Austria-Hungary soon reached the Mediterranean Agreement with Britain. The League of the Three Emperors was re-established in 1881 but quickly fell apart. Bismarck then negotiated the secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887, to prevent a Franco-Russian encirclement of Germany. Each power promised neutrality unless Russia attacked Austria-Hungary.

  The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 also belongs to this period. Bismarck had opposed colonies for years, saying he was "no man for colonies". He believed the cost of obtaining and defending them would outweigh any benefit. He thought the formal German bureaucracy would work poorly in the tropics, and he feared colonial quarrels would distract Germany from Europe. He once told Chlodwig of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst that Germany could only be pleased if France took Morocco, since that would keep France busy and distracted from Alsace-Lorraine.

  In 1883-1884, he suddenly reversed himself and built a colonial empire in Africa and the South Pacific almost overnight. It began with German New Guinea in 1884. The African colonies were Togoland, German Kamerun, German East Africa and German South-West Africa. The Berlin Conference, which he organised, set rules for acquiring African colonies and protected free trade in parts of the Congo Basin.

  Historians debate his motive. Public opinion had begun demanding colonies for German prestige. He wanted to undercut anti-colonial liberals sponsored by the Crown Prince, who might soon become emperor and remove him. The merchants and traders of Hamburg, his neighbours at Friedrichsruh, also influenced him. Hans-Ulrich Wehler argues that domestic political and economic forces drove the policy, as a way to strengthen traditional social structures and avoid a major war.

  William L. Langer concluded that the intricate alliance system worked and carried Europe through critical years without a rupture. In February 1888, during a Bulgarian crisis, Bismarck warned the Reichstag that Germany might have to fight on two fronts. Bulgaria, he said, was not worth plunging Europe into a war whose result nobody could foresee. At its end, we should scarcely know why we had fought.

  He had voiced the same idea in December 1876, when Balkan revolts threatened to draw Austria-Hungary and Russia into war. Privately he described himself as holding two powerful heraldic beasts by their collars, to stop them tearing each other apart or striking a deal at Germany's expense. To the Reichstag he said that no German interest justified risking the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian musketeer.

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• 8. Welfare and Legacy

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  In March 1884, Bismarck told the Reichstag that the real grievance of the worker was the insecurity of his existence. A worker could never be sure of steady work, of good health, or of an income once he grew old. If illness pushed him into poverty, he was helpless, and ordinary poor relief, worse in big cities than in the country, did little.

  Bismarck argued that every state, by its nature, owed help to people in distress. He said that if the state showed more Christian concern for workers, the appeal of the Social Democrats would fade. He called his approach practical Christianity, and also state socialism.

  The social legislation answered the social question raised by industrialisation. Scholars Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis describe the strategy as conservative state-building. It aimed to win ordinary Germans, and not only the Junker elite, to the throne and the empire. Social rights would bind workers to the state, preserve traditional authority between status groups, and counter the forces of liberalism and socialism. Bismarck worked closely with large industries and hoped to stimulate economic growth by giving workers greater security.

  A secondary concern was beating the Social Democrats, who had no welfare proposals of their own and opposed his. Two advisers, Hermann Wagener and Theodor Lohmann, persuaded him to give workers a corporate status in the legal and political structures of the new state.

  He wanted programmes acceptable to conservatives, without socialist features. He doubted laws that protected workers on the job, such as rules on safety, working hours, and women's and child labour. He believed they would force employers and workers to cut production and so harm the economy.

  In November 1881 he opened the debate in an Imperial Message to the Reichstag, using the term practical Christianity. The programme centred on insurance designed to raise productivity and draw workers' political attention toward supporting the Junkers' government. It covered sickness, accident and disability insurance, plus a retirement pension, none of which then existed to any great degree. The Reichstag filed three bills on accident and sickness insurance. Despite these measures, support for the Social Democrats rose at every election.

  Under Bismarck's direction, the Imperial Reichstag was sidelined and did not control government policy. A staunch monarchist, he ruled autocratically through a strong bureaucracy, with power concentrated in the Junker elite. Wilhelm II dismissed him, and he retired to write his memoirs. He died on the 30th of July 1898.

  During the German imperial period, nationalists made him a hero and built monuments in his honour. Historians praise him as a visionary who kept the peace in Europe through diplomacy. Critics point to his persecution of Catholics and his authoritarian rule as chancellor.

  The cost of his departure showed quickly in foreign policy. After he left office in 1890, the secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia was not renewed. That left Germany with a critical problem if war came.

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