Throne-Makers. William Roscoe Thayer
apparently useless ark than were the Prussian minister and his King by their critics, who did not see the purpose of the ark the two were building. Bismarck merely insisted that the army, on which depended the integrity of the nation, could not be subjected to the caprice of parties; it was an institution above parties, above politics, he said, which the King alone must control.
At the same time, the Minister-President actively pursued his other project—the expulsion of Austria from Germany. When the King of Denmark died, in December, 1863, the succession to the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein was disputed. Bismarck seized the occasion for occupying the disputed territory, in partnership with Austria. England protested, France muttered, but neither cared to risk a war with the allied robbers. When it came to dividing the spoils, Bismarck, who had recently gauged Austria’s strength, struck for the lion’s share. Austria resisted. Bismarck then approved himself a master of diplomacy. Never was he more clever or more unscrupulous, shifting from argument to argument, delaying the open rupture till Prussia was quite ready, feigning willingness to submit the dispute to European arbitration while secretly stipulating conditions which foredoomed arbitration to failure, and invariably giving the impression that Austria refused to be conciliated. As the juggler lets you see the card he wishes you to see, and no other, so Bismarck always kept in full view, amid whatever shuffling of the pack, the apparent legality of Prussia. In the end he drove Austria to desperation.
In June, 1866, war came, with fury. One Prussian army crushed with a single blow the German states which had promised to support Austria; another marched into Bohemia, and, in seven days, confronted the imperial forces at Sadowa. There was fought a great battle, in which the Prussian crown prince repeated the master stroke of Blücher at Waterloo, and then Austria, hopelessly beaten, sued for peace.
Bismarck now showed himself astute in victory. Having ousted Austria from Germany, he had no wish to wreak a vengeance that she could not forgive. Taking none of her provinces, he exacted only a small indemnity. With the German states he was equally discriminating: those which had been inveterately hostile he annexed to Prussia; the others he let off with a fine. He set up the North German Confederation, embracing all the states north of the river Main, in place of the old German Confederation; and thus Prussia, which had now two thirds of the population of Germany, was undisputed master. The four South German states, Bavaria, Würtemberg, Hesse, and Baden, signed a secret treaty, by which they gave the Prussian King the command of their troops in case of war.
Europe, which had witnessed with astonishment these swift proceedings, understood now that a great reality had arisen, and that Bismarck was its heart. In France, surprise gave way to indignation. Were not the French the arbiters of Europe? How had it happened that their Emperor had permitted a first-rate power to organize without their consent? Napoleon III, who knew that his sham empire could last only so long as he furnished his restless subjects food for their vanity, strove to convince them that he had not been outwitted; that he still could dictate terms. He demanded a share of Rhineland to offset Prussia’s aggrandizement; Bismarck refused to cede a single inch. Napoleon bullied; Bismarck published the secret compact with the South Germans. Napoleon forthwith decided that it was not worth while to go to war.
We have all heard of the sportsman who boasted of always catching big strings of fish. But one day, after whipping every pool and getting never a trout, he was fain, on his way home, to stop at the fishmonger’s and buy a salt herring for supper. Not otherwise did Napoleon, who had been very forward in announcing that he would take land wherever he chose, now stoop to offer to buy enough to appease his greedy countrymen. He would pay ninety million francs for Luxemburg, and the King of Holland, to whom it belonged, was willing to sell at that price; but Bismarck would consent only to withdraw the Prussian garrison from the grand duchy, after destroying the fortifications, and to its conversion into a neutral state. That was the sum of the satisfaction Napoleon and his presumptuous Frenchmen got from their first encounter. A few years before, Napoleon, who had had frequent interviews with Bismarck and liked his joviality, set him down as “a not serious man;” whence we infer that the Emperor was a dull reader of character.
Although, by this arrangement, the Luxemburg affair blew over, neither France nor Prussia believed that their quarrel was settled. Deep in the heart of each, instinct whispered that a life-and-death struggle was inevitable. Bismarck, amid vast labor on the internal organization of the kingdom, held Prussia ready for war. He would not be the aggressor, but he would decline no challenge.
In July, 1870, France threw down the glove. When the Spaniards elected Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern to their vacant throne, France demanded that King William should compel Leopold to resign. William replied that, as he had not influenced his kinsman’s acceptance, he should not interfere. The prince, who was not a Prussian, withdrew of his own accord. But the French Secretary of State, the Duc de Gramont, had blustered too loudly to let the matter end without achieving his purpose of humbling the Prussian King. He therefore telegraphed Benedetti, the French Ambassador, to force King William to promise that at no future time should Leopold be a candidate for the Spanish crown. Benedetti delivered his message to William in the public garden at Ems; and William, naturally refusing to bind himself, announced that further negotiations on the subject would be referred to the Foreign Minister.
The following morning Bismarck published a dispatch containing a brief report of the interview; adding, however, that the King “declined to receive the French Ambassador again, and had him told by the adjutant in attendance that his Majesty had nothing further to communicate to the Ambassador.” This deceitful addition produced exactly the effect which Bismarck intended: every German, whether Prussian or not, was incensed to learn that the representative German King had been hectored by the French emissary, and every Frenchman was enraged that the Prussian King had insulted the envoy of the “grand nation.” Bismarck, who had feared that another favorable moment for war was passing, now exulted, and Moltke, who had for years been carrying the future campaign in his head, and whose face grew sombre when peace seemed probable, now smiled a grim, contented smile. In Paris, the ministers, the deputies, the newspapers, and the populace clamored for war. Apparently, Napoleon alone felt a slight hesitation; but he could hesitate no longer when the popular demand became overwhelming. On July 19 France made a formal declaration of war, and the Parisians laid bets that their victorious troops would celebrate the Fête Napoléon—August 15—in Berlin. Had not their War Minister, Lebœuf, assured them that everything was ready, down to the last button on the last gaiter of the last soldier?
We cannot describe here the terrible campaign which followed. In numbers, in equipment, in discipline, in generalship, in everything but bravery, the French were quickly outmatched. When Napoleon groped madly for some friendly hand to stay his fall, he found that Bismarck had cut off succor from him. The South Germans, whom the French had hoped to win over, fought loyally under the command of Prussia; Austria, who might have been persuaded to strike back at her late conqueror, dared not move for fear of Russia, whose friendship Bismarck had secured; and Italy, instead of aiding France, lost no time in completing her own unification by entering Rome when the French garrison was withdrawn. Forsaken and outwitted, the French Empire sank without even an expiring flash of that tinsel glory which had so long bedizened its corruption. And when the French people, lashed to desperation, continued the war which the Empire had brought upon them, they but suffered a long agony of losses before accepting the inevitable defeat. They paid the penalty of their former arrogance in every coin known to the vanquished—in military ruin, in an enormous indemnity, in the occupation of their land by the victorious Prussians, and in the cession of two rich provinces. Nor was that enough: they had to submit to a humiliation which, to the imagination at least, seems the worst of all—the proclamation of the Prussian King William as German Emperor in their palace at Versailles, the shrine of French pomp, where two centuries before Louis XIV had embodied the ambition, the glory, and the pride of France. The German cannon bombarding beleaguered Paris paused, while the sovereigns of the German states hailed William as their Emperor.
This consummation of German unity was the logical outcome of an international war, in which all the Germans had been impelled, by mutual interests quite as much as by kinship, to join forces against an alien foe. Twenty years before, Bismarck had opposed German unity, because it would then have made Prussia the plaything of her confederates; in this later scheme he was the chief agent, if not the