War and Peace in Europe from Napoleon to the Kaiser: the Wars of German Unification, 1864- 1871 Transcript

War and Peace in Europe from Napoleon to the Kaiser: The Wars of German Unification, 1864- 1871 Transcript Date: Thursday, 4 February 2010 - 12:00AM Location: Museum of London The Wars of German Unification 1864-1871 Professor Richard J Evans 4/2/2010 Of all the war that took place in the nineteenth century, perhaps the most effective in gaining their objectives, the most carefully delimited in scope, the best planned, and the most clinically and efficiently executed, were the three wars fought by Prussia in the 1860s, against Denmark, against Austria, and against France. Not all of them went entirely to plan, as we shall see, particularly not the last of the three, but all of them were in nearly all respects classic examples of limited war, of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz's dictum that war is politics continued by other means. After the muddle, incompetence and indecisiveness of the Crimean War, the wars of the 1860s seemed to belong to another world. How and why were these three wars fought? I argued in my earlier lectures that the 1848 Revolutions, though they failed in many if not most respects, undermined the international order established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, opening up the international scene to new initiatives and instabilities. The joker in the pack here was the French Emperor Napoleon III, whose search for foreign glory and foreign victories as a way of legitimating his dictatorial rule at home led him into one military adventure after another, some successful, others less so. It was among other things French military intervention that secured victory for Piedmont-Sardinia over the Austrians in 1859, though the drive for Italian unity then became unstoppable, thanks not least to the activities of the revolutionary nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi, much to Napoleon III's discomfiture. The unification of Italy had been a great international cause since well before the 1848 Revolutions, and Garibaldi's "thousand" volunteers included men from a wide variety of nations. All over Europe, Italian unification gave a tremendous boost to the idea of the nation-state, which had been so badly defeated only a decade before. New nationalist associations and pressure-groups began to form, and nowhere were they more active in Germany, where the Nationalverein, the National Association, was established in 1859 and rapidly won adherents amongst middle-class liberals. Two years later, the revivified liberals founded the Progressives Party, whose aims included the election rather than appointment of governments and administrative bodies, the guarantee of civil and religious freedom, and, crucially, the effective replacement of the tradition-bound Prussian army, with its aristocratic officer corps, its independence from legislative supervision, as an institution answerable to the King alone, by a people's militia under the budgetary and supervisory control of parliament. Liberal nationalists knew that a major reason for their defeat in 1848 had been the failure of the national parliament assembled at Frankfurt to establish control over the armies of Prussia, Austria and the other states, and they were determined not to make the same mistake again. There was one key difference between the liberals who had begun the abortive attempt to unify Germany in 1848 and their successors who sought to repeat the process a decade or more later. The experience of 1848 had taught them that the idea of a unified Germany with the boundaries of the German confederation was not a viable one. The Czechs in Bohemia objected to being absorbed into a state dominated by German-speakers. And just as important, the Habsburgs, as the reassertion of their authority in 1849 had shown, were not going to allow the parts of their Empire that fell within the borders of the German confederation to be lopped off and assigned to a new German nation-state. Even before the final defeat of the Revolution, therefore, most German nationalists had come to the conclusion that if Germany was going to be unified, it would have to be without Austria and Bohemia, without the Habsburgs. And that meant that it would have to be led by Prussia. The problem was that Prussia was not a liberal state. The parliament had only very limited powers and controlled neither ministers nor the army. Progressives therefore began a major offensive to try to gain control over the army and put their militia plan into effect. By 1862, a year after their formation, when the limited franchise secured the middle-class Progressives a controlling position in the parliament, they had got nowhere. To make matters worse, the army introduced a new system of universal conscription and increased the length of service from two to three years, thus enormously boosting the size and influence of the army under its existing administration. So the Progressives exercised one of the few real powers of the legislature, the right to approve the state budget, and voted it down. Without parliamentary approval it would be illegal to collect taxes or spend money on keeping the government and administration going. And they were not prepared to grant it until they won the argument over the replacement of the army by a militia. In this stalemate, the King of Prussia, Wilhelm I, a conservative man of a military background who was already in late middle age by the time he came to the throne in January 1861, turned to the toughest and most conservative politician he knew: Otto von Bismarck, whose views were considered so dangerously reactionary that he had been forced to spend the last four years in effective exile as Prussian ambassador in St Petersburg. On 23 September 1862, the King appointed Bismarck Minister-President and Foreign Minister. The liberals were horrified. A week later, Bismarck confronted the budgetary committee head-on. "Prussia", he told them, "must concentrate and maintain its power for the favorable moment which has already slipped by several times. Prussia's boundaries according to the Vienna treaties are not favorable to a healthy state life. The great questions of the time will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions-that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849-but by iron and blood." Nothing can have been more calculated to strike terror into the Prussian liberals. But what exactly did this mean? In the first place, it is clear from the map that Prussia was indeed something of a ramshackle creation. While the core areas of the old Prussian state, East and West Prussia, lay outside the German confederation, the newest part of the Kingdom, Rhinepand-Westphalia, added by the Congress of Vienna, was separated from the rest of Prussia by the Kingdom of Hanover. The addition of the western areas was by the middle of the century proving to be a huge advantage to Prussia: traditionally a centre of manufacture and commerce, they were now undergoing rapid industrialization; they included the iron-and-steel powerhouse of the Ruhr, with its huge engineering and armaments firms like Krupps, and the eastern part of the vast coalfield that stretched across into Belgium and northwestern France. But they had to be governed separately, they had a different set of laws and administrative arrangements, and communication with the rest of the Kingdom was understandably very difficult. The Kingdom of Hanover, something of a political and economic backwater, had been ruled by the Kings of Britain until 1837, but fortuitously, the accession of Queen Victoria, who as a woman was debarred from becoming a German monarch because of the Salic Law, effectively severed Hanover's ties with the world's leading commercial and naval power. Bismarck thus saw the opportunity to join up the different bits of Prussia in a single state, not, as he said, by votes and resolutions within the German Confederation, but by force: force which he proposed to place in the service of German unification, not on the liberals' terms, but on his own. In the meantime, Bismarck authorized the continued collection of taxes on the authority of the 1861 budget, and the business of government and administration continued on this undoubtedly illegal basis for four years. On the face of it, his reputation as a reactionary was thoroughly confirmed. But to perceptive observers it become clear that his reputation as a reactionary was by the 1860s no longer entirely true; or to be more precise, a reactionary in his principles and purposes he might have remained, but by this time he had become convinced that to achieve them, he had to use novel and even revolutionary means. Otto von Bismarck, born on 1 April 1815, had become well known by the time of the 1848 Revolution as the wild man of the German right. His family background was in the Prussian aristocracy, the famous Junkerlandowning class, and in the service nobility that supplied the administrators to the Prussian state. After a youth spent dueling and having numerous affairs, he married a pious aristocratic woman, Johanna von Puttkamer in 1847, which seems to have turned him to a deeply religious, conservative and monarchical political position; in the Prussian parliament called in 1847, he belonged to the ultra-conservative faction and came out in support of the King's divine right to absolute rule. When the 1848 Revolution broke out, he tried, though without success, to get the peasants of his estate to march on Berlin to help defeat the revolutionaries. He was a passionate advocate of Prussian independence and Prussian power, and opposed the unification of Germany because he feared it would destroy Prussian independence. Not surprisingly, perhaps, in the reaction that followed the defeat of the revolution, the Prussian king appointed him in 1851 as Prussia's representative to the general meetings of the German Confederation, the loosely organized grouping of the German states that met in Frankfurt.

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