But that was exactly Bismarck’s position in late 1857 and afterwards, a ‘doubtful political intriguer’ always showing up at the palace uninvited, an ambitious, clever, unstable figure, whom Edwin von Manteuffel had every reason to mistrust. Nevertheless, when it became a question of Bismarck’s appointment to the Minister-Presidency, Manteuffel backed him loyally. Like Roon he saw that nobody could or would do for the army what Bismarck had in mind.
In 1860 all that lay ahead and Bismarck vegetated in Berlin without orders. Apparently the Prince Regent had specifically issued instructions that Bismarck ‘should stay here’,68 and simply wait, not an easy order to obey for somebody of Bismarck’s volcanic temperament, but not unusual for the Prince Regent. He combined a genuine concern for his servants with a sovereign disdain for the price his long hesitations would impose on them. The first round of ‘Bismarck as Foreign Minister’, took four months; the next round of ‘Bismarck as Minister-President’ to be played out in 1862 would take longer and be even more nerve-wracking. Still, even the lesser prize attracted the restless Bismarck, as he confessed to his brother, if somebody ‘put a pistol to [his] breast, it would be cowardice to refuse’ the office of Foreign Minister.69 Nobody did. In early June 1860, he telegraphed Schlözer from Kovno that he would arrive in a day or two.70 And, apparently this suited him. After his return to St Petersburg, he wrote to Legation Councillor Wentzel, a former subordinate in Frankfurt:
I have settled in here at considerable cost for many years to come and could not wish for a more agreeable chief than Schleinitz. I have really got close to him and am rather fond of him. I wish sincerely that his desire to change places with me never happens, I would not last six months as minister.71
None of this suggests that Bismarck had given up his ambition to be Foreign Minister or Minister-President nor that he had now settled down to enjoy the view over the Neva from his ambassadorial residence. One of his implacable enemies, the Prime Minister of Baden, Franz Freiherr von Roggenbach, wrote on 25 August 1860, to the liberal academic and journalist Max Duncker, that Bismarck was nothing more than ‘an unprincipled Junker who wants to make his career in rabble-rousing’.72 There is something in the charge but there was much more to Bismarck than that. He really yearned for peace and contentment in some imagined countryside but, when he had it, it made him restless. He behaved brutally to friends but cared very much for his brother and sister. The other side of him comes to expression in the following letter which he wrote to his sister, one of the most beautiful I have found:
I have to be torn from the clockwork mechanism of work here and through an Imperial summons be commanded to have a few free hours to come to my senses and write to you. Daily life controls my every movement from the breakfast cup to about four with every manner of duty, in paper or person, and then I ride until six. After dinner I approach the inkwell on doctor’s orders only with great care and in the most extreme emergency. Instead I read documents and newspapers that have arrived and about midnight I go to bed amused and thoughtful about all the strange demands that the Prussian in Russia makes of his ambassador. Before dropping off to sleep I think then of the best of all sisters but to write to that angel becomes possible only when the Tsar orders me to appear for an audience at 1 and I have to take the 10 a.m. train. So I have two hours during which the apartment of the most beautiful of all grandmothers, Princess Wjäsemski, is placed at my disposal, where I write you … I look out over the desk and through the window down the hill over birch and maples in whose leaves red and yellow dominate the green, behind them the grass green roofs of the village, to the left of which a church with five onion-shaped domes stands out and that all framed against an endless horizon of bush, meadow and woodland. Behind their brown, grey tints somewhere, visible with a spy-glass could be seen St Isaac’s in Petersburg … After the long wanderings since the beginning of 1859 the feeling of actually living with my family somewhere is so soothing that I tear myself from the home and hearth very unwillingly.73
Both sides of Otto von Bismarck were present at all times: the family man who craved the soothing quiet of his own home, the loving brother who addressed his letter to his kid sister ‘my beloved heart’, and in the same moment he could behave as the tenacious, devious, and utterly ruthless schemer, determined to get power no matter how.
That Bismarck was unhappy struck the young Friedrich von Holstein, who joined the St Petersburg embassy in January 1861 as an unpaid intern, as we would now call him. Years later he recorded his first impressions of the great man whom he idolized and served for thirty years:
When I presented myself, he held out his hand and said, ‘you are welcome’. As he stood there, tall, erect, unsmiling, I saw him as he was later to appear to his family and the rest of the world: A man who allows no one to know him intimately … At that time Bismarck was forty-five, slightly bald, with fair hair turning grey, not noticeably corpulent, sallow complexion. Never gay, even when telling amusing anecdotes, a thing he did only occasionally, in particularly congenial company. I have never known anyone so joyless as Bismarck.74
The judgement that Bismarck had no ‘joy’ in life may well reflect Holstein’s own ‘joyless’ last years and his disillusion with the idolized genius he had once adored, but the lack of warmth in the greeting must have made a deep impression on the young diplomat.
On 18 January 1861, thirty-six new infantry regiments, none of which had been authorized by the Landtag, presented their standards at the tomb of Frederick the Great.75 Minister-President von Auerswald went to ask Manteuffel to intervene with the King and got a dose of Manteuffel’s arrogance and provocative attitude:
I do not understand what Your Excellency desires. His Majesty has ordered me to arrange a military ceremony. Am I to renounce this because there are a number of people sitting in a house on the Dönhoff Platz, who call themselves a Landtag and who may be displeased with this ceremony? As a general, I have never yet been ordered to take my instructions from these people.76
Manteuffel’s outrageous attitude angered a young liberal deputy called Karl Twesten. In April 1861 he published anonymously an 88-page pamphlet entitled ‘What can still save us: a blunt word’.77 He attacked Manteuffel personally as a dangerous political general, long out of contact with the army, which distrusted him. ‘Will we have to suffer a Battle of Solferino before we can remove this unwholesome man from an unwholesome position?’78 Manteuffel demanded to know the name of the author and Twesten acknowledged it, whereupon Manteuffel challenged Twesten to a duel which took place on 27 May 1861. Twesten’s shot missed Manteuffel, who offered to withdraw the challenge if Twesten would retract. Twesten refused and Manteuffel, a much better shot, shattered Twesten’s right arm. When he offered to shake hands, Twesten apologized for offering his left hand and said, ‘he will have to excuse me that it is not the right hand but that he himself has made impossible.’79 The duel made both participants nationally famous and personalized the issues between the army and the nation in an emotional form, exactly what Manteuffel wanted to do. Twesten’s intemperate speeches and vivid language further inflamed the conflict.
The King was beside himself with distress about the duel. He told Roon, ‘I have a bucket full of trouble.’ It was bad enough that the duel, an act forbidden by law, between Deputy Twesten and Military Cabinet Chief von Manteuffel, forced King William to dismiss von Manteuffel and call for a military court martial; but worst of all, was the personal impact:
In just this moment to be without Manteuffel’s service, a triumph for the democracy which managed to chase him out of my presence; the excitement that the affair must cause in my immediate family circle, these are things that look set to rob me of my sanity, because it puts an unhappy new stamp on my government. Where does heaven want to lead me?80
Early in June a group of left liberals, with the wounded Twesten foremost among them, formed a new party, the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, the German Progressive Party, committed to a national state, a strong government,
full parliamentary authority, and communal self-government. It was the first formal party programme in German history.81 The new party became at a stroke the largest in the Landtag.
In the meantime another row had blown up about the coronation ceremony for William I as King of Prussia. Liberals insisted that he take an oath on the constitution and the King absolutely refused to countenance any such concession. He intended to have a feudal ceremony of homage. Roon now went into action. The time had come to summon Bismarck to take power. On 28 June 1861 he sent Bismarck a telegram with the following wording: ‘It is “nothing” [English in the original—JS]. Start your planned holiday without delay. Periculum in mora [danger in delay].’ The telegram was signed Moritz C. Henning, which Bismarck would at once recognize as his friend, Moritz Karl Henning von Blanckenburg. The phrase Periculum in mora would recur in the more famous summons of 1862.82
Bismarck took his time in reply, wrote a letter on 1 July, added a paragraph on the 2nd, and sent it with a further addition on the 3rd by the English courier to Berlin. He was in no hurry to take power until his agenda had been accepted. The coronation ceremony was too trivial to topple the Auerswald cabinet and priorities in domestic and foreign policy were exactly the wrong way round—conservative abroad and liberal at home, as Bismarck explained to Roon in a letter in July 1861:
the good royalist mass of voters will not understand the coronation issue and the Democracy will distort it. It would be better to stick firmly to the military question, break with the chamber on it and call new elections to show the nation how the King stands by his people.83
The letter shows that by the summer of 1861 Bismarck had the firm outlines of the policy he was to follow in 1863 and 1864. No concessions to liberalism at home, the battle to be fought over the military question at whatever cost in bad election results, and an aggressive foreign policy to catch the popular imagination. ‘We are almost as vain as the French. If we can convince ourselves that we have respect abroad, we will put up with a lot at home.’84 Bismarck went to Berlin and then Schleinitz ordered him to Baden, while Roon travelled in other directions. They simply could not reach each other and coordinate a place to meet, no matter how urgently they needed to talk. How the cell phone simplifies arrangements!
In September on holiday in Stolpmünde, Bismarck wrote a summary of his position on the German question to his close friend, Alexander Ewald von Below-Hohendorf. It is, I think, the clearest account of Bismarck’s contempt for the world of the petty princes and the most drastic statement of his own very unconventional conservatism. Remember that this text was addressed to a dear friend, who had looked after him in 1859 when he was ill and who prescribed Christian love as the remedy for Bismarck’s illness. Imagine how such a devout rural gentleman would have reacted to the cynicism dripping from this prose.
The system of solidarity of the conservative interests of all countries is a dangerous fiction … We arrive at a point where we make the whole unhistorical, godless and lawless sovereignty swindle of the German princes into the darling of the Prussian Conservative Party. Our government is in fact liberal domestically and legitimist in foreign policy. We protect foreign monarchical rights with greater tenacity than our own and wax lyrical about little sovereignties created by Napoleon and sanctioned by Metternich to the point of utter blindness to all the dangers to which Prussia’s and Germany’s independence is exposed as long as the madness of the present federal constitution survives, which is after all nothing but a green house and storage centre for dangerous and revolutionary separatist movements … Beside I cannot see a reason why we coyly shrink from the idea of a popular assembly, whether at the Federal level or in the Zoll Parliament; an institution, which operates in every German state and which we Conservatives in Prussia cannot do without, can hardly be called a revolutionary innovation.85
This kind of Realpolitik repelled the pious Christians who were conservatives out of faith and not self-interest. Bismarck no longer hesitated to broadcast his views to all those who might be persuaded and those who might not.
While Bismarck attacked the ‘sovereignty swindle’, the King backed down on the feudal ceremony and was crowned without further friction on 18 October 1861, in Königsberg. Bismarck as a royal servant attended the ceremony and wrote a typical letter to his sister about how the ceremony threatened his health:
Changing clothes three times a day and the draughts in all the halls and corridors still lies in all my extremities. On the 18TH on the palace grounds in the open air I had as a precautionary device put on a thick military uniform and a wig in comparison to which Bernhard’s is a mere lock of hair, otherwise the two hours bare-headed would have been very bad for me.86
Concessions on the homage question had not improved the atmosphere in the classes that voted in Prussia. On 6 December 1861 Prussian voters returned a lower chamber of 352 deputies, of whom 104 were German Progressives who had remained the largest party, 48 other Liberals, and 91 ‘constitutionals’ (moderate liberals who supported the Auerswald government); in other words, 69 per cent of the new Landtag belonged to the liberal persuasion and of those the most extreme wing had become the largest. Bismarck’s conservative friends had shrunk from 47 deputies to a mere 14, a sorry rump for the party of the Junker ruling class.87
On 3 April 1862 Edwin von Manteuffel wrote a letter to Roon in which he cheerfully conjured up the threat of revolution:
I recognize no advances in the battle except with weapons in hand, and we are in the midst of the battle. How can the three-year service be given up during his reign without bringing shame to the personal position of the All-Highest? … The army will not understand it; its confidence in the King will slacken and the consequences for the internal condition of the army will be incalculable … We shall see bloody heads and then good election results will come.88
Max Duncker, the liberal journalist, quoted Psalm 42 to sum up the situation: ‘As the hart panteth after the water-brooks so the army thirsts for riots.’89
In this overheated atmosphere, the kingdom’s voters went to the polls on 6 May 1862. By 18 May, the two stages of the elections had been completed and the government of the King had suffered an unmitigated electoral disaster. The left liberals had gained 29 seats compared to 1861 and at 133 members formed the largest Fraktion, as the parliamentary parties were called, in the Landtag. The other Liberals had doubled their representation from 48 to 96 and the remaining ‘Constitutionals’ who had supported the New Era shrank from 91 to 19 seats. The numbers showed an unequivocal shift to the left. The left liberals now controlled 65 per cent of the seats and the King’s supporters had shrivelled to a mere 11 deputies.90
Was Prussia on the eve of revolution? Was this the great ‘turning point where nothing turned’? There are good reasons to think the answer is no. Structural factors suggest that there were no grounds to fear revolution. Let us look at the voting figures. The three-class voting system which the constitutional amendment of 1850 had introduced created an odd electoral system. Class 1 contained the top 5 per cent of taxpayers, Class II the next 13 per cent, and Class III the remaining 81 per cent. It was a universal but very unequal system of suffrage and favoured, as was intended, the well-to-do. If we take the contested election of 6 December 1861, the numbers of those entitled to vote were as follows with figures in percentages showing the share of each class of the total number of those entitled to vote.
The share of power granted by this system to the lower orders meant that the vote in Prussian elections mattered most to those with the most. The taxation basis insured that only a tiny number of people could vote in category I in the electoral districts; sometimes no such voters appeared at all, because nobody in the electoral district paid enough tax. At the other end, the complex two-stage voting system (voters voted for electors called Wahlmänner, who then voted for candidates), and the rigged system of weighting made it impossible for the masses to get involved. Electoral turnout in Category III was always low, usually well under 20 p
er cent. Thus the hotly contested elections of the Konfliktzeit attracted only the voters in Classes I and II. The German Progressive Party looked threatening to Manteuffel but it represented the well-educated and well-heeled bourgeoisie who were unlikely to erect guillotines on the pavement in front of the royal palace.
We know this now, of course, because the liberals never staged a revolution nor even managed to organize passive resistance such as a tax strike, that is, a refusal to pay taxes until the Landtag’s right to control the army’s budget had been granted. A tax strike had recently brought the reactionary Prince-Elector of Hesse-Cassel to the negotiating table when he tried to rule without his parliament. Could anybody be certain that constant agitation by the progressive liberals might not in the end have brought the masses into the streets? Manteuffel and a few extremists among the senior officers hoped that a ‘bloody heads’ scenario would be the pretext to restore the absolute monarchy, abolish the constitution, and quash electoral activity, creating in effect a military dictatorship. Neither the King nor Roon wanted that kind of outcome; indeed Roon had been willing to compromise for a long time, much to the disgust of Manteuffel.
Bismarck: A Life Page 23
