Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  Early in the new year the Austrian Foreign Minister Buol wrote to Count Leo Thun:

  If it comes to a war, I prefer that Prussia does not stay on our side. A war with Prussia against Russia is a great embarrassment for us. If Prussia sides with Russia, so we wage war with France against Prussia. Then we take Silesia. Saxony will be restored and we have peace at last in Germany. For that price France can gladly take the Rhineland.48

  On 10 January 1855 Bismarck was summoned to Berlin for consultations where he stayed until 18 January. Relations at Frankfurt between Bismarck and Prokesch had entirely broken down. On 20 February 1855 Herr von Buol-Schauenstein wrote to Manteuffel to inform the Prussian government of the forthcoming recall of Prokesch and to announce his replacement, Johann Bernhard Graf von Rechberg und Rothenlöwen. Buol took the occasion to ask whether in view of Herr von Bismarck’s ‘remarks that have become notorious and especially in conversation with non-German envoys [which] show implacable enmity against Austria’ it might not be ‘feasible’ to substitute Herr von Bismarck, a request which Manteuffel rejected ‘decisively’.49 Bismarck remarked in a letter to his brother that he would like Prokesch to stay, because ‘such a clumsy opponent I shall never get again.’50 In this crisis about an Austrian alliance, Bismarck had his first real diplomatic triumph. The excitement among the small states was growing, he wrote:

  More or less all of them want to mobilize, with Austria against Russia, we are to protect Germany’s frontiers. That the French will march through our territory, everybody here takes for granted.51

  Complex negotiations followed about military mobilization. The intricacies of the rules, the status of votes in the Military Committee as opposed to the Plenum or Narrower Council, seem to have been as incomprehensible to outsiders in 1855 as the proceedings of EU Council of Ministers or the Commission are today. On 30 January 1855 the Bund rejected Prokesch’s motion to mobilize and the Austrians withdrew it. Bismarck’s counter-motion used the word ‘neutrality’ and, in reply to a further Austrian request of the Bund to mobilize, Bismarck agreed but added the clause that mobilization must be a deployment ‘in every direction’ (that is, mobilization against France), which removed the anti-Russian thrust and comprehensively outmanoeuvred the Austrians. Bismarck had used the fear of the small German states that they might find a French invading force marching over their borders, to make neutrality universal, that is, against all possible belligerents, which, of course, included Austria and Britain. Engelberg concludes that ‘the Prussian Envoy had delivered his diplomatic master’s thesis; his apprenticeship and journeyman period had come to an end.’52 Prokesch wrote bitterly to Buol:

  Austria today seems to have been put under a ban by the Bund, and there are loud boasts that they have tamed it under Prussia’s lead and they must force it to negotiate. ‘Armed neutrality’ as a rule against France and Austria is now praised as the ni plus ultra of diplomatic wisdom, and that we helped to bind us ourselves that way is the stuff of laughter.53

  Years later, Bismarck told his personal assistant Christoph Tiedemann that he had outsmarted his Austrian counterpart in 1865 by doing exactly the opposite. He challenged Count Blome, the Austrian envoy at Gastein in 1865, to a game of cards and played so wildly and recklessly that Blome assumed that he had the same attitude to his diplomacy.54 Sir Robert Morier, for many years the British ambassador to several German courts, wrote perceptively of Bismarck’s divided self. In a letter to Odo Russell, British ambassador to Prussia, he summed Bismarck up in these words:

  Do not forget that Bismarck is made up of two individuals, a colossal chess player full of the most daring combinations and with the quickest eye for the right combination at the right moment and who will sacrifice everything even his personal hatred to the success of his game—and an individual with the strangest and still stronger antipathies who will sacrifice everything except his combinations.55

  And these ‘combinations’ had worked at Frankfurt. Now Bismarck urged Leopold von Gerlach to stiffen the spines of decision-makers in Berlin:

  For the matter seems to me so obvious and straightforward that the French must know we shall react to troops with troops. That’s the only way to avoid complications with France.56

  The Crimean War ground to its inglorious end and Napoleon III called for a Peace Conference in Paris in 1856, which opened on 24 February. A new young Tsar Alexander II had come to the throne and realized that the Russian defeats represented systemic rather than individual failure. The Tsarist regime needed reform, modernization, and the inclusion of the growing educated middle class. In a way, the defeat in the Crimean War had the same effect on Russia in 1856 that the battle of Jena had on Prussia exactly fifty years before. The Tsar had to infuse the system with patriotism and ‘intelligence’ without undermining autocracy. The serfs had to be emancipated. Village and county schools had to be introduced, towns had to have municipal governments. The scale and risks of the reform programme confirmed the truth of de Tocqueville’s wise remark that ‘the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it decides to reform.’57 It also meant that Russia, defeated and preoccupied with its internal institutions, would withdraw from great power politics for the foreseeable future. Without Russia’s defeat in the Crimea, Bismarck could never have fought his three wars of unification. The rule of central European power had been constant since 1700 (and in a way still is): when Russia is up Germany is down; when Germany is up, Russia is down. Equally important, Prussia had stayed neutral and managed to maintain its cordial ties to Moscow. The Austrians had ‘betrayed’ Russia and could expect nothing from its former ally. When the time came, Bismarck knew exactly how to exploit Russian resentment to destroy Austrian authority in Germany.

  Another international event affected Bismarck equally powerfully but less happily. On 29 September 1855 Queen Victoria wrote in her Leaves from our Journal in the Highlands, ‘Our dear Victoria was this day engaged to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, who had been on a visit to us since the 14th.’58 In March 1856 the famous radical British politician, Richard Cobden, wrote to a friend that

  Mr Buchanan, the American Minister … sat next to the Princess Royal. He was in raptures about her and said she was the most charming girl he had ever met: ‘All life and spirit, full of frolic and fun, with an excellent head and a heart as big as a mountain’.59

  Bismarck disliked the English marriage from the start. The Prussian sons-in-law of her

  ‘Her Gracious Majesty’ will find no sort of respect in England … Among us, on the other hand, British influence will find the most fruitful soil in the stupid admiration of the German ‘Michel’ for Lords and Guineas, in the anglo-mania of parliament, the newspapers, sportsmen, landlords and presiding judges. Every Berliner even now feels himself elevated if a real English jockey from Hart or Lichtwald talks to him and gives him the chance to grind out the crunched fragments of the Queen’s English. How much worse will that be when the First Lady of the Land is an English woman.60

  In 1856 and 1857, another and very important issue began to strain Bismarck’s friendship with his patrons, the two brothers Gerlach. Bismarck had begun to think hard and utterly unconventionally about the usefulness of Napoleon III for the achievement of Prussian aims. To think such thoughts, let alone to express them to either of the Gerlach brothers, amounted to an attack on their fundamental principles. Napoleon III embodied ‘revolution’ and must be quarantined, not accepted. His regime was ‘illegitimate’. He was a ‘red’, ‘a usurper’, and a ‘democrat’. Bismarck disagreed. Possibilities must be matters of rational calculation of forces and counter-forces; the player needs to know the rules of the game, the psychologies of the other players, and the number of moves open to him. As he observed years later,

  My entire life was spent gambling for high stakes with other people’s money. I could never foresee exactly whether my plan would succeed … Politics is a thankless job because everything depends on chance and conjecture. One has to reckon with a series of
probabilities and improbabilities and base one’s plans upon this reckoning.61

  The metaphors that Bismarck began to use in the 1850s came from his experiences in games of chance, cards, dice, and the like.62 Politics had, he asserted more and more openly, nothing to do with good and evil, virtue and vice; they had to do with power and self-interest. The exchange of letters between Bismarck and his patrons about Prussia’s attitude to Napoleon III marked a turning point in Bismarck’s career and the first serious break with the Christian Conservatives to whom he owed his official position. In the summer of 1856 Bismarck visited Paris and received a lecture from Leopold von Gerlach on that account. He replied:

  You scold me that I have been to Babylon but you can hardly expect from a diplomat eager to learn the rules this sort of political chastity … I have to get to know the elements in which I have to move from my own direct observation when the opportunity arises. You need not fear for my political health. I have a nature like a duck and water runs off my feathers and there is a long way between my skin and my heart.63

  By 1857 Bismarck had stopped joking and wrote two letters to Leopold von Gerlach, which offer us the first sight of the mature Bismarck in full power and clarity. These letters announce the emergence of a new diplomatic style, the birth of what came to be known as Realpolitik, for which—interestingly—there is no apt English translation. Langenscheidt’s two-volume German–English dictionary suggests ‘practical politics, politics of realism’ but neither catches the complete idea. The following exchange of letters between Bismarck and Leopold von Gerlach constitutes a kind of practical definition of the term; do what works and serves your interests. Bismarck quoted these letters in full in his memoirs written nearly forty years later, which suggests that he continued to see them as fundamental even in his retirement and old age. The tone had changed. Bismarck had ceased to be the apprentice, the ‘diplomatic child’, and had become one of the grand masters of the game of international relations. The first letter is dated 2 May 1857. In it Bismarck wrote his declaration of independence from his patron. The issue was again what stance should Prussian foreign policy take towards Napoleon III. This letter, perhaps the most important he wrote to Gerlach, needs to be quoted at some length:

  You begin with the assumption that I sacrifice my principles to an individual who impresses me. I reject both the first and the second phrase in that sentence. The man does not impress me at all. The ability to admire people is but moderately developed in me, not unlike a defect of vision that gives me a sharper eye for weaknesses than strengths. If my last letter had a rather lively colouring, I ask you to attribute that to a rhetorical mechanism with which I hoped to influence you. What the principle is that I am supposed to have sacrificed, I cannot correctly formulate from what you write … France only interests me as it affects the situation of my Fatherland, and we can only make our policy with the France that exists … Sympathies and antipathies with regard to foreign powers and persons I cannot reconcile with my concept of duty in the foreign service of my country, neither in myself nor in others. There is in them the germ of disloyalty to the lord or the land which one serves … As long as each of us believes that a part of the chess board is closed to us by our own choice or that we have an arm tied where others can use both arms to our disadvantage, they will make use of our kindness without fear and without thanks.64

  On 6 May 1857 Leopold von Gerlach replied in an unusually defensive and uncertain style:

  If you feel a need to remain in agreement with me on a matter of principle, it is incumbent upon us to seek out this principle, first of all, and not to content ourselves with negations, such as ‘ignoring facts’ and the ‘exclusion of France from the political combinations’ … My political principle is, and remains, the struggle against the Revolution. You will not convince Napoleon that he is not on the side of the Revolution. He has no desire either to be anywhere else, for his position there gives him his decided advantages. There is thus no question either of sympathy or of antipathy here. This position of Bonaparte is a ‘fact’ which you cannot ‘ignore.’ … You say yourself that people cannot rely upon us, and yet one cannot fail to recognize that he only is to be relied on who acts according to definite principles and not according to shifting notions of interests, and so forth.65

  Gerlach, in what was for him an unusually long and systematic letter, put the counter-argument very clearly. Politics must rest on principle, because only principle provided the steady foundation for alliances and initiatives. A principled state is a reliable state. Bismarck replied at even greater length in a letter of 30 May 1857.

  The principle of struggle against revolution I recognize as mine as well but I consider it mistaken to make Louis Napoleon the only … representative of revolution … How many existences are there in today’s political world that have no roots in revolutionary soil? Take Spain, Portugal, Brazil, all the American Republics, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Greece, Sweden and England which bases itself on consciousness of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 … And even when the revolutionary appearances of the past have not reached that degree of superannuation that like the witch in Faust with her drink from hell ‘here I have a bottle out of which I take a nip from time to time which no longer stinks at all’, states did not show the necessary modesty to withdraw from loving contact. Cromwell was called ‘dear brother’ by very anti-revolutionary potentates and his friendship was sought when they needed it. Very honourable potentates had alliances with the Estates of the Netherlands before their independence had been recognized by Spain. William of Orange and his successors in England were recognized as thoroughly kosher by our forefathers, even while the Stuarts still claimed the throne, and we forgave the Unites States of America their revolutionary origins in the Treaty of the Hague in 1785 … The present form of government in France is not arbitrary, a thing that Louis Napoleon can correct or alter. It was something that he found as a given and it is probably the only method by which France can be ruled for a long time to come. For everything else the basis is missing either in national character or has been shattered and lost. If Henry V were to come to the throne he would be unable, if at all, to rule differently. Louis Napoleon did not create the revolutionary conditions; he did not rebel against an established order, but instead fished it [power] out of the whirlpool of anarchy as nobody’s property. If he were now to lay it down, he would greatly embarrass Europe, which would more or less unanimously beg him to take it up again.66

  Throughout 1857, Leopold von Gerlach tried to maintain that ‘from my side, there’s not the slightest reason for bad feeling between us.’67 In January 1858, he ended a long letter with the pathetic words, ‘do come here; it is so necessary that we fix our positions. With old love, yours, L.v.G.’68 A long break followed until in May 1860 when he wrote,

  You will be surprised to get a political letter from me and even from Sanssouci as in the old days … I write as if things were as they used to be in the old days … It depresses me especially that through your bitterness against Austria you have allowed yourself to be diverted from the simple choice between Right and Revolution. You play with the idea of an alliance with France and Piedmont, a possibility, a thought, that for me lies far away as it should be, dear Bismarck, for you. Forgive me that I have closed this letter ‘at random’ [English in original—JS]. I do not count on a meeting, but remain always with sincere love your old friend, L.v.G.69

  Bismarck replied to his old mentor and patron on 2 May 1860, and it cannot have done much to raise the old man’s spirits. He put the differences between them very clearly:

  You want to have nothing to do with Bonaparte or Cavour as a matter of principle. I want to avoid France and Sardinia, not because I think it wrong, but because in the interests of our security I consider them very dubious allies. Who rules in France or Sardinia, once the Powers have been recognized, is absolutely unimportant to me, a matter of fact not right or wrong … France would be of all possible allies the most questionable, a
lthough I must keep the possibility open, because one cannot play chess if 16 of the 64 squares are forbidden from the beginning.70

  That was the last letter Bismarck wrote to his ‘loving’ patron. Leopold von Gerlach died on 10 January 1861 of a cold he picked up at the funeral of Frederick William IV, which Bismarck described in his memoirs.

  Moreover, he was devoted body and soul to the King, even when, in his opinion, the monarch erred. This was plain from the fact that he may be said to have ultimately met his death of his own free will by following behind the dead body of his King bareheaded, helmet in hand, and that in a high wind and very cold weather. This last act of an old servant’s devotion to his master’s body ruined an already much enfeebled health. He came home ill with erysipelas, and died in a few days. His end reminded me of the way in which the followers of the old Germanic princes used voluntarily to die with them.71

  This cold farewell to a person to whom Bismarck owed much of his success and almost certainly the appointment to Frankfurt as ambassador in 1851 was typical. Gerlach had been useful but Bismarck in the memoirs made no mention of that. Old Gerlach was a throwback to an earlier age. It may be too crude to note that after October 1857, when King Frederick William IV had a stroke and could no longer govern,72 Leopold von Gerlach lost his immediate usefulness to Bismarck in any case. Bismarck had used him and his closeness to the King to get ideas and suggestions to the Monarch without censorship by Otto von Manteuffel, the Minister-President and Foreign Minister. The following year, on 7 October 1858, a year after the King’s severe stroke, it became clear that Frederick William IV would not recover. His younger brother, William Prince of Prussia, became Regent in his name and formed the government of the so-called ‘New Era’, which was influenced by the Wochenblattpartei, the conservative liberals among whom Bismarck’s pet hate, Robert von der Goltz, played a leading role. As Leopold von Gerlach reminded him in his last letter to Bismarck, from 1 May 1860: