Bismarck’s agenda could scarcely have been more different. The Confederation as such played no role in his planning. His ultimate objective was to annex the duchies to Prussia. The Prussian Chief of Staff Helmut von Moltke may well have been the key influence here. Moltke was strongly opposed to the transformation of the duchies into an independent principality, on the grounds that the new entity might become a satellite of the Habsburgs and open up a hole in Prussia’s northern seaward flank. As Bismarck knew, however, a unilateral annexation would have exposed Prussia to the threat of combined reprisals from Austria, the rest of the Confederation, and possibly one or more European powers. The extra troops would also come in handy, especially if, as Moltke warned, the Danes succeeded in exploiting their superiority at sea to evacuate their troops from the mainland. The agreement to work with Austria was thus a temporary device to limit risk and ensure that all options remained open.21
The Danish war came to an end on 1 August 1864, when the Danes were forced to sue for peace. Three features of the conflict deserve emphasis. The first is that the Prussians did not outperform the Austrians militarily. One early mistake was to nominate the Prussian Field Marshal Count Friedrich Heinrich Ernst von Wrangel as overall commander of the allied forces. The eighty-year-old Wrangel was old for his years and, though popular with the conservatives at court, at best a mediocre general. All his combat experience had been acquired against civilian insurgents in the revolutions of 1848. While Wrangel lurched from blunder to blunder in Denmark, the Austrian units acquitted themselves with courage and skill. On 2 February 1864, one Austrian brigade charged and took the Danish positions at Ober-Selk with such panache that old Wrangel rushed to embrace and kiss its commander on the cheeks, to the embarrassment of his Prussian colleagues. Four days later, the Austrian Brigade Nostitz broke through heavily defended Danish fortifications at Oeversee, while a Prussian Guards division on their flank looked on almost inert. These were frustrating setbacks for an army that had not experienced war for half a century and desperately needed to prove its mettle, both to the international community and to
a domestic population that had been following the political struggle over military reform.22
A second striking feature of the conflict was the primacy of the political over the military leadership. The Danish war was the first Prussian armed conflict in which a civilian politician exercised control. Throughout the war Bismarck ensured that the evolution of the conflict served the objectives of his diplomacy. He prevented the Prussian forces from pursuing the Danish army into Jutland during the early weeks of the war, so as to reassure the great powers that the joint campaign was not aimed at the territorial integrity of the Danish kingdom. There were slip-ups, to be sure – in mid-February, Wrangel sent an advance detachment of Guards north of the Jutland border despite instructions to the contrary. But Bismarck persuaded the war minister to send a sharp reprimand to the elderly general, and Wrangel was relieved of his command at Bismarck’s insistence in mid-May. It was Bismarck who oversaw Prussian communications with Vienna, ensuring that the terms of the alliance evolved to Prussia’s advantage. And in April it was Bismarck who insisted that the Prussian forces attack the Danish fortifications at Düppel in Schleswig, rather than mounting a protracted invasion of Denmark that might have dragged the other powers into the conflict.
The decision to attack Düppel was controversial. The Danish positions there were heavily fortified and manned, and it was clear that a Prussian frontal attack would succeed only – if at all – with numerous casualties. ‘Is it supposed to be a political necessity to take the bulwarks?’ asked Prince Frederick Charles, a brother of the king, who had been placed in charge of the siege. ‘It will cost a lot of men and money. I don’t see the military necessity.’23 The case for engineering a showdown at Düppel was indeed political rather than military. A full-blown invasion of Denmark was undesirable for diplomatic reasons and the Prussians sorely needed a spectacular victory. There was much grumbling among the commanders, but Bismarck’s will prevailed and the deed was done. On 2 April, the Prussians began a heavy bombardment of the defence works, using their new rifled field guns. On 18 April, the infantry went in under the command of Frederick Charles. It was no easy fight. The Danes offered fierce resistance from behind their battered defences and subjected the Prussians to heavy fire as they climbed the slopes before the entrenchments. Over 1,000 Prussians were killed or wounded; the Danes suffered 1,700 casualties.
46. Prussian troops storm the Danish entrenchments at Düppel, 18 April 1864. Contemporary engraving.
Bismarck’s dominance throughout the conflict generated considerable tension and ill-feeling. When the commanders protested, Bismarck was quick to remind them that the army had no business interfering in the conduct of politics – itself an extraordinary declaration in the Prussian setting, and one which reveals how things had changed since the revolutions of 1848. The army, however, had no intention of accepting this verdict, as War Minister Albrecht von Roon made clear in a memorandum of 29 May 1864:
There has been, and is now hardly any army that regarded itself and understood itself to be purely a political instrument, a lancet for the diplomatic surgeon. [… ] When a government depends – and this is our situation – particularly upon the armed part of the population [… ] the army’s views on what the government does and does not do are surely not a matter of indifference.24
In the exhilaration of victory, these altercations were quickly forgotten, but the issue underlying them would later resurface in more acrimonious and menacing forms. Bismarck’s assertion of control over virtually every branch of the executive papered over but did not solve the structural problem of civil–military relations at the apex of the Prussian state. The 1848 revolutions had parliamentarized the monarchy without demilitarizing it. At the heart of the post-revolutionary settlement lay an avoided decision that would haunt Prussian (and German) politics until the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy in 1918.
Prussia’s victories in Denmark – Düppel was followed at the end of June by a successful amphibious assault on the island of Alsen – also transformed the domestic political landscape. The resulting wave of patriotic enthusiasm opened up latent divisions within the Prussian liberal movement. The Arnim-Boitzenburg petition of May 1864, which called for annexation of the duchies, attracted 70,000 signatures, not only from conservatives but from many liberals as well. Prussian military successes also had an unsettling effect more generally, since they seemed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the reform programme so bitterly opposed by the liberals. There was a growing desire for a settlement with the government, reinforced by the fear that if the conflict dragged on, the liberal movement would forfeit its purchase on public opinion.
During 1864 and 1865, Bismarck and ‘his’ ministers played skilfully with the parliament, confronting it with bills that divided the liberal majority or forcing it into unpopular positions. In the naval construction bill of 1865, for example, the government asked parliament to approve the building of two armed frigates and a naval base in Kiel, at a cost of just under 20 million thalers. The creation of a German navy was a fetish to the liberal nationalist movement, especially in the aftermath of the Danish war, where naval operations had played a prominent role. The overwhelming majority of the deputies strongly supported the proposed expenditures, but they were forced nevertheless to reject the bill on the grounds that, in the absence of a legal budget, no new funds could be approved by parliament. Bismarck seized his opportunity to deliver a tirade against the ‘impotently negative’ attitude of the chamber.25
The minister-president could afford to gamble in this way because the coffers of the Prussian government were full to overflowing. During the 1850s and 1860s, the Prussian economy experienced the transforming effects of the first world boom. Rapid growth in the railway network and in associated enterprises, such as steel smelting and machine-building, was supported by a phenomenal expansion in the extraction of fossil fuels. During
the 1860s, the coalmines of the Ruhr district in the Prussian Rhineland grew at an average rate of 170 per cent per annum bringing economic and social change at a pace unparalleled in the history of the region. This growth was sustained by the convergence of change on many different levels: quality gains at every stage of production, savings through improvements to transport infrastructure, a highly liquid capital market (supported by the gold rushes in Australia and California), a favourable balance of trade and, as we have seen, the withdrawal of the Prussian government from various forms of regulation that had previously obstructed growth.
Although the boom slowed somewhat during the ‘first world slump’ of 1857–8, the 1860s saw a return to robust expansion, though on a broader sectoral basis than had been the case for the previous decade. By contrast with the 1850s, when growth was largely driven from within the heavy-industrial sector, the 1860s witnessed more coordinated expansion across heavy industry, textiles and agriculture. This was sustained by steadily growing investment through banks and in joint-stock companies that yielded increasingly high rates of return.26
The combination of this prolonged boom with the fiscal and financial improvements of the 1850s and the expansion of production in the state-owned mines had a predictable effect on government revenues. In March 1865 Bismarck boasted to a confidant that the Danish war had largely been financed out of budget surpluses for the previous two years; only 2 million thalers had had to be sourced from the state treasury. Nor did it seem likely that the money would run out in the near future. Obliging entrepreneurs, such as the Cologne banker Abraham Oppenheimer and his Berlin colleague Gerson Bleichröder, besieged the minister-president with lucrative offers to privatize government enterprises or buy out the state-owned shares of semi-public companies. ‘The financiers are pressing loans on us without parliamentary approval,’ Bismarck declared, ‘but we could wage the Danish War twice over without needing one.’27
PRUSSIA’S WAR AGAINST GERMANY
On 1 August 1864, King Christian of Denmark ceded all rights to the duchies to Prussia and Austria and they passed under a joint Austro-Prussian military occupation, pending a decision concerning their future by the German Confederation. All of this looked rather like the inauguration of an era of harmonious dual hegemony based on cooperation between the two German major powers. This was certainly what the Austrians were after and Bismarck did his best to encourage their hopes. In an instruction of August 1864 to the Prussian ambassador in Vienna, he offered the ingratiating observation that ‘a true German policy is only possible when Austria and Prussia are united and take the lead. From this high standpoint, an intimate alliance of the two powers has been our aim from the outset. [… ] If Prussia and Austria are not united, politically Germany does not exist.’28 This was no more than eyewash. Bismarck’s objective was still to annex both duchies to Prussia and neutralize Austrian political influence in Germany. He planned to do so, if necessary, by war. Already in 1863 he had suggested to the Russians that Prussia might soon mount a surprise attack on the Austrian Empire ‘as under Frederick II in 1756’.29 His tactic was to keep all options open by eking out the joint occupation while at the same time picking fights with the Austrians at every possible opportunity.
In the diplomatic struggle that ensued over the future of Schleswig-Holstein the Austrians were at a geopolitical disadvantage. The duchies were extremely remote from Vienna, and Austria’s interest in maintaining a troop presence there was correspondingly lukewarm. In the autumn of 1864, the Austrians offered Berlin a choice between two courses of action: the Prussians could either (a) recognize the duchies as a separate state under the Augustenburg dynasty or (b) annex them to Prussia and compensate Austria with land along the Silesian border. Bismarck rejected both options, declaring that Silesia was not negotiable and adding rather mysteriously that Berlin had special rights in both duchies. This was followed up in February 1865 by a provocative declaration to the effect that Prussia intended to regard any form of ‘independent’ Schleswig-Holstein as a Prussian satellite. In the meanwhile, the Prussians in the duchies continued to extend their control, prompting furious complaints from the Austrians, who responded by taking the matter to the Confederal Diet and putting the Augustenburg succession back on to the table. By the summer, it looked as if war was imminent. The crisis was deferred when Francis Joseph sent an ambassador to negotiate a new agreement with King William.
The result was the Convention of Gastein signed on 14 August 1865. Based on a proposal by Bismarck, the Convention maintained joint Austro-Prussian sovereignty in the duchies, while placing Schleswig under Prussian and Holstein under Austrian control. But Gastein was no more than an interim arrangement conceived by Bismarck as a means of gaining time. The Prussian provocations in Holstein continued and in January 1866, Berlin seized on a pro-Augustenburg nationalist meeting in Holstein to accuse Vienna directly of breaking with the terms of the treaty. On 28 February, a crown council in Berlin resolved that war between the two German powers was inevitable. The assembled generals, ministers and senior diplomats agreed that Austria had failed to honour the Gastein Convention and continued to treat Prussia as a rival and an enemy. There was general assent when Bismarck pointed out that Prussia’s mission was to lead Germany and that this very ‘natural and justified’ ambition had been unjustly blocked by Austria. The crown prince was alone in pleading for a non-military resolution.30
Bismarck’s next step was to seek an alliance with Italy. Negotiations began soon after the crown council and a treaty against Austria was signed on 8 April 1866. The two states were now committed to assist each other in the event of a war breaking out with Austria over the following three months. (Bismarck also revived the time-honoured Prussian tradition of the Hungarian fifth column, deployed by Frederick the Great during the Seven Years War and again in the 1790s by Frederick William II, but his contacts with the Hungarian revolutionary movement produced nothing of any consequence.) At the crown council of 28 February, Bismarck had announced as well that he intended to seek ‘more definite guarantees’ from France, and feelers were duly extended to Paris. These produced a chain of vague proposals and counterproposals. Exactly what assurances Bismarck gave to Napoleon has been hotly disputed, but it seems likely that French neutrality was bought with the promise of compensations in Belgium, Luxembourg and possibly in the region between the Rhine and the Moselle (encompassing the Prussian Saarland and the Bavarian Palatinate). Since the Austrians secretly purchased French neutrality on very similar terms (including a French satellite state in the Rhineland!), Napoleon III had every reason to be confident that France would end up as a beneficiary of the Prusso-Austrian conflict, whoever emerged as the victor.31
Russia was the third power whose attitude was crucial to the success of Prussian designs. Russia had blocked the unionist designs of Frederick William IV and Radowitz in 1848–50, while helping to restore Austria’s fortunes. By 1866, however, things had changed. Russia was locked into a process of fundamental domestic political reform. Relations with Austria were still cool (Russian strategic planning foresaw Austria and Britain – not Prussia – as the most likely opponents in a future war). The post-Crimean estrangement between the two eastern empires had already yielded dividends for Cavour in 1859. This lesson was not lost on Bismarck, who had just left his post at Frankfurt and happened to be stationed at the Prussian embassy in St Petersburg when the Italian crisis broke. Bismarck had cultivated relations with Russia with great care since coming to office as minister-president and there seemed little reason to fear intervention from this quarter.32
These diplomatic preparations were flanked with other measures intended to disorient the German liberal camp and unsettle public confidence in the German Confederation. On 9 April, Bismarck sprang a proposal on the diet calling for the creation of a German national parliament to be elected by direct universal male suffrage. The Confederal representatives were still mulling over this unexpected initiative when news of troop movements in Italy triggered
a partial Austrian mobilization on 21 April. Now began a chain of troop deployments and counter-measures that culminated in a full-scale mobilization on both sides.
As the two German great powers prepared for a war, it became clear that most of the lesser states of the Confederation supported Austria. On 9 May, a majority of representatives to the diet voted in favour of a resolution demanding that Prussia explain its mobilization. At the end of the month, the Austrians formally passed responsibility for the duchies to the Confederation. During the first week of June, Prussian troops entered Holstein, encountering no resistance from the Austrians, who withdrew into Hanover. On 11 June, the Austrian ambassador to the diet denounced the Prussian occupation of Holstein as illegal and in breach of the terms of the Convention of Gastein and proposed a resolution calling for the mobilization of the Confederation against Prussia. On 14 June, at the last plenary meeting of the diet in Frankfurt, this resolution was passed by majority vote and the Prussian ambassador walked out, declaring that his government regarded the Confederation as dissolved. Five days later, the Italians declared war on Austria.33
With Russian and French neutrality virtually assured, Prussia went to war with Austria in the summer of 1866 under an auspicious great power constellation. Yet the outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion. Most well-informed contemporaries – including Emperor Napoleon III, who had actually fought the Austrians in 1859–predicted an Austrian victory.34 The combat performance of the two armies in the Danish war had done nothing to dispel this view. It is true that Prussians had embarked on a programme of military reforms after 1859, but these were not as revolutionary as has often been claimed.35 In any case, Austria too had responded to the disasters of 1859 with its own reform programme. Its artillery was sophisticated and deployed by well-trained battery teams. It was true that Prussia enjoyed a slight superiority in numbers in the Bohemian theatre of operations where the war would be decided: 254,000 Prussians faced the 245,000 troops of Austria’s North Army. The situation would have been very different, of course, had the Italians not committed over 200,000 men to their offensive in Venetia, forcing the Austrians to divert an extra 100,000 troops to the south-western front.
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