Nationalism in Germany, 1848

Such claims were contested at the time and have been challenged since.⁶ To the Hanoverian historian Onno Klopp, there had been a systematic and successful, if not always conscious, attempt to achieve ‘the alienation of Germans from Austria’.⁷ Given that both the Habsburg monarchy and the German Confederation had been widely discounted as bases of a German nation-state, nationalists had to look elsewhere – most obviously, to Prussia – for sources of support.⁸ The temptation to look to Prussia, irrespective of previous opposition, occurred from the elevated circles of the princes to the ranks of disaffected and exiled radicals. Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, ‘as a German patriot’, was ‘above all interested in the unity of Germany’, whichever ‘way it comes into being’.⁹ His many trips to Vienna to persuade ‘Austria to put itself at the head of Germany’, after Friedrich Wilhelm IV had turned down the title of Kaiser in 1849, ‘met with no approval at all’, for ‘the idea was too great for the rulers there’, who wanted ‘only to have to do with themselves’.¹⁰ As a consequence, he ‘again and again came back to the belief that it [unification] can only come about through Prussia’.¹¹ At the other end of the political spectrum, the radical forty-eighter Ludwig Simon, who had been in exile since 1849 and had been condemned to death by Prussian authorities in his absence, likewise supported the Nationalverein’s ‘goal of achieving German unity through the influence and strength of the Prussian state’.¹² Although he remained attached to a ‘republic as a higher and more beautiful expression of human life together than a monarchy’, he acknowledged that ‘the conditions of political effectiveness are completely different today compared to 1848’, with the ‘ten-year reality of princely sovereignty, which has completed its reactionary course everywhere and without interruption’, replacing ‘the short dream of theoretical popular sovereignty’.¹³ In such circumstances, it seemed to Simon,

Prussia recommended itself as the greatest predominantly German state, as the Protestant bulwark of religious enlightenment, in which even – or in particular – Catholics enjoy equal rights, as the founder of the Zollverein and pioneer of a lowering of tariffs, and as the Heimat of a young but not hopeless constitutional life; in short, because of its entire historical position, on the strength of which it has become interwoven more and more with Germany, whereas Austria has increasingly grown apart from Germany.¹⁴

Certainly, it would have been better, continued the democrat, if ‘the goal of German unity’ could have been attained ‘through the strength of the German Volk alone, without any aftertaste of a specific Prussianness and dynastic interests’, but this appeared unlikely, leaving only ‘a joining of forces with the respectable kernel of orderly Prussian power’.¹⁵

The principal question for such conditional supporters of Berlin was the extent to which Prussia would remain a constitutional regime, after Bismarck’s acceptance of the Minister-Presidency in 1862 in the midst of a deadlock between Wilhelm I’s government and the Chamber of Deputies over a reform of the army. How far could the Prussian administration be influenced by public opinion and to what extent did it genuinely desire national unification rather than Prussian aggrandisement? How significant was unification compared to other domestic and foreign-policy goals for governments, political parties and public opinion? In particular, how important were economic and financial imperatives deriving from membership of the Zollverein? Lastly, would a Prussian-led unification of Germany lead to a recognisably liberal and constitutional nation-state? Even if there were no alternative means of unifying Germany over the short term, was it advisable to withdraw support from Prussia and to await future events?

New Era, Old Politics

Responses to a Prussian-inspired ‘New Era’ were mixed. In states like Bavaria, there was a parallel movement towards greater openness and more liberal policies, with a stronger opposition – a consequence of the elections of December 1858 – criticising censorship and delays in the completion of judicial and administrative reforms. Eventually, in the spring of the following year, Maximilian II ceded to calls for Pfordten’s resignation, arguing, ‘I want to have peace with my people and with the chambers; that is why I have dismissed the ministry.’¹⁹ Similarly, in Baden, after a dispute about the newly signed Concordat in 1859, the Grand Duke replaced the existing government with the leaders of the opposition in 1860. By contrast, the reactionary Minister-President Ferdinand von Beust remained in office in Saxony and the coup of 1855 remained in force in Hanover. Nevertheless, in Germany as a whole, ‘a movement came gradually into existence which was directed at the common goal of pooling all the powers of non-Austrian Germany under the leadership of Prussia in the event of a war with France’.²⁰ There were two important changes after 1858. First, national associations and parties emerged, despite the continuance of the Bund decision of 1854 outlawing affiliations of parties and other organisations, largely because Prussia was no longer willing to enforce the confederal interdiction. In the opinion of Gustav Freytag, even the government of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, where the Nationalverein was eventually domiciled, was anxious about the enforcement of the 1854 law, although conscious that Berlin would probably oppose it.²¹ Second, democrats reassumed a political role in both the Nationalverein and Fortschrittspartei, with some forty-eighters returning from exile and other radicals entering politics for the first time.

Between 1858 and 1863, an interlocking network of national organisations had developed which dominated the political landscape of Prussia and a number of smaller states. It had ramifications throughout Germany. The Kongress deutscher Volkswirte (founded in March 1859), the German Nationalverein (September 1859), the Deutscher Juristentag (1860), the Deutscher Handelstag (May 1861), the Fortschrittspartei (June 1861), the Abgeordnetentag (1862), the Deutscher Journalistentag (1863) and the Deutscher Protestantenverein (1863) were established within five years by an elite of middle-class notables, many of whom were deputies in Landtage. According to one study, 68 per cent of leaders of the principal national associations had seats in state assemblies; 36 per cent were members of more than one national committee; 83 per cent were Protestants; 83 per cent were university-educated, the majority of them lawyers; and 96 per cent had experienced 1848 as adults.²² Many members of the governing committee of the pivotal national organisation of the 1860s, the Nationalverein, were also on the boards of other organisations, including the Danzig merchant and manufacturer Heinrich Behrend (Handelstag 1861–64, Abgeordnetentag 1862), the Hanoverian politician and judge Rudolf von Bennigsen (Kongress deutscher Volkswirte 1858–59, Abgeordnetentag 1862–67), the Bavarian journalist Karl Ludwig Theodor Brater (Abgeordnetentag 1862–67), the owner of the Volks-Zeitung Franz Duncker (Abgeordnetentag 1862–67), the Weimar lawyer Hugo Fries (Abgeordnetentag 1862–67), the Göttingen lawyer and later mayor of Osnabrück Johannes Miquel (Abgeordnetentag 1862–67), the Cassel lawyer and returned exile Friedrich Oetker (Abgeordnetentag 1862–67), the Heidelberg academic and journalist Eduard Pickford (Kongress deutscher Volkswirte 1858–59, Abgeordnetentag 1862–67), the Berlin former lawyer and publicist Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch (Kongress deutscher Volkswirte 1858–66, Abgeordnetentag 1862–67), the Coburg journalist and lawyer Fedor Streit (Abgeordnetentag 1862–67), the Berlin railway entrepreneur Hans-Viktor von Unruh (Abgeordnetentag 1862–67) and the Frankfurt doctor Johann Georg Varrentrapp (Abgeordnetentag 1863–66). They represented the notable circles of almost all the Landtage and many of the largest cities in Germany, mobilising the political elites of their localities and reactivating the national networks of 1848–49 in order to create a series of overlapping national professional, commercial and political organisations.

The Nationalverein, which was designed to have a political platform and an electoral role from its inception, was the largest party organisation of the period, with 5,369 members by 1860, 20,000–25,000 by 1862, 18,000 in 1864, and 5,314 in 1866 (see Table 5.1). Its followers largely belonged to the Wirtschafts- and Bildungsbürgertum, and they were spread across the German lands, with 8,421 members in Prussia (1861), 1,416 in Hessen-Darmstadt, 1,173 in Baden, 847 in Hamburg and Bremen, 664 in Hanover, 559 in Weimar and Saxe-Coburg, 513 in Nassau, 478 in the small states of Thuringia, 428 in Frankfurt, 386 in Württemberg, 355 in Bavaria, 337 in Schleswig-Holstein, 228 in Saxony, and 609 in exile. A list of 587 Nationalverein members in Berlin compiled by Adalbert Delbrück, an agent of the association, revealed that 29 per cent were merchants, 10 per cent manufacturers, 8 per cent doctors, 5 per cent academics, 3 per cent teachers, 4 per cent lawyers, 1 per cent journalists, 22 per cent from the ‘neuer Mittelstand’, and 11 per cent from the petty bourgeoisie, mainly master artisans.²³ The Abgeordnetentag, whose aims and membership coincided with that of the leadership of the Nationalverein but whose origins could be traced back to the scepticism of constitutionalists and South German liberals and democrats with regard to the National Association’s purportedly pro-Prussian and democratic stance, was similarly national in scope, attracting 490 deputies from virtually all Germany’s state assemblies at its height in December 1863: 21.8 per cent came from Bavaria (1863), 14.9 per cent from Frankfurt, 9.8 per cent from Württemberg, 9.4 per cent from Prussia, 9 per cent from Baden, 8.6 per cent from Hessen-Darmstadt, 6.3 per cent from Hessen-Kassel, 4 per cent from Nassau, 3.3 per cent from Hamburg and Bremen, 2 per cent from Saxony, and 1.8 per cent from Hanover (see Table 5.2). Together, such deputies provided links, in addition to the centralised organisation of the Nationalverein, to nearly all German states and many cities. They comprised an almost exclusively liberal or democratic political elite.

As Unruh declared in a famous essay – ‘Was hat Preussen zunächst in der deutschen Sache zu tun?’ – in the Deutsche Jahrbücher in September 1861, it was obvious that the ‘current condition of Germany and of Prussia’ was ‘completely unsustainable in the long term’:

The Holy Alliance created these conditions, and with the dissolution of the Holy Alliance by Louis Napoleon, the artificial, unnatural edifice of Germany strained and snapped in all its joints … Only Prussia can construct the new building, and it has the sacred duty of doing so … The urge of the German Volk towards state unity, power and security is not revolutionary, but moral and justified. The right to be a Volk again is so primordial, so timeless and inalienable, of such divine origin, that the right of princes to keep Germany fragmented and dependent on foreign lands cannot oppose it … The German Volk demands nothing new, something which never existed; it is asking for that which it possessed for a thousand years … Without Germany, there is no political future for Prussia and the Hohenzollern dynasty, and without Prussia, Germany will succumb unfailingly to the fate of Poland … The most daring policy is the most certain and least dangerous for Prussia.³⁴

To the founders of the Fortschrittspartei, the interests of the Prussian people, like those of other German populations, were identical to those of Germany. The Abgeordnetentag intended to unite these populations through their party representatives in a form of German Vorparlament. In a similar vein, the free-trade Kongress deutscher Volkswirte aimed, in the words of one of its leaders, to represent, ‘not single estates, but the economic interests … of the entire German fatherland’, and the Deutscher Handelstag, which was a federal organisation of individual chambers of commerce, hoped to achieve ‘unity in a commercial context’, since economic unity, unlike its political counterpart, did not affect the sovereign rights of the German princes’, in the estimation of its founder.³⁵ As in 1848, leaders anticipated the creation of a German market, National Assembly and central power.

The striking confidence of liberal leaders in advancing their national claims after 1858, in contrast to their hesitancy during the 1850s, was partly the corollary of large-scale democratic participation in politics for the first time since 1849. Accordingly, new national associations could claim with greater conviction that they represented the entire Volk against bureaucratic ‘absolutism’ and the sectional interests of what Unruh termed ‘the successors of the feudal estates’ at the Court.³⁶ As Schulze-Delitzsch – a democratic-leaning left liberal himself – wrote to Biedermann in June 1859, ‘the introduction of the Reichsverfassung [of 1849] would be right in my opinion; the whole democratic party in Prussia, with the exception of a few radicals who scarcely come into consideration, could be won over’.³⁷ For his part, Biedermann believed that democrats as well as liberals in both the North and the South constituted ‘the voice of the nation (Nation)’, legitimating the policies of the Nationalverein.³⁸ As long as the association did ‘not leave the path of legality’, it was assured ‘the support of public opinion in Germany’, both democratic and liberal.³⁹ While it is true that membership dues of 1.45 Gulden excluded the majority of the lower orders and students, ensuring that it was dominated by men ‘at the centre of political life’, in Bennigsen’s phrase, the National Association nonetheless went to considerable lengths to foster and protect workers’ organisations, subsidising the Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine and paying for a delegation of workers to go to the World Exhibition in London in 1862, for example.⁴⁰ Similarly, it sought to represent other mass-membership national associations such as those of gymnasts, marksmen and choristers in the belief that ‘it is not their job to concern themselves with politics’, as Miquel put it at one regional Turnfest in 1863.⁴¹ Despite the social exclusivity of their leadership, with 40 per cent of Prussian deputies of the Fortschrittspartei in 1862 coming from the civil service, 20.7 per cent from the liberal professions, and 9.6 per cent each from estate-owners and merchants and manufacturers, national organisations could not afford – in terms of their finances and their legitimacy – to ignore wider society. For this reason, wrote Schulze-Delitzsch to Freytag in October 1859, the Nationalverein could not be a secret society, as the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had proposed; rather, it had to be ‘an open form of association’, if it were ‘to achieve a practical, enduring effectiveness’.⁴² Openness was essential for the association because it nurtured ‘the feeling of justification and of trust in our cause’ and because it obliged ‘the Volk’ to ‘show the necessary moral strength to avail itself, in the face of unpopularity, of its legal rights, within legal limits’:

The association is a test both upwards and downwards. Our Volk must get used to such agitation in the fullest openness and legality, and namely also bring along the necessary means, without which the lasting pursuit of such aims is impossible. Not a revolution, but a cash-box! Either something important will come from the seed sown or nothing at all; there is no middle way for me, and I only desire to be in a position to devote all my time and energy to the movement.⁴³

The ‘national movement’ had to be popular and democratic in the broad sense of the words.

The re-entry of large numbers of democrats into German assemblies after 1858 signalled the return of popular politics, recalling the fact that they had come to dominate the Frankfurt parliament in 1848–49. Before the revolution, contended the Catholic Historisch-politische Blätter in 1858, liberals had been weak, requiring an alliance with democrats in order to appear popular and legitimate, only to be abandoned by radicals in 1848 after failing to harness revolutionary forces.⁴⁴ In the political turmoil of the revolution and the early 1850s, the Grenzboten had remarked in 1854, party affiliations and labels had been conflated, with many democrats going into exile and those who remained in Germany adopting different names, such as ‘Mittelpartei’.⁴⁵ After 1858, it seemed to many contemporaries, the old boundaries between parties would be re-established. Whereas liberals appeared to the Leipzig periodical to have no principles, returning democrats were unambiguously in favour of universal suffrage and popular sovereignty, attempting – in the opinion of the old liberal Constantin Rössler – to secure the predominance of a popular assembly by purely mechanical means.⁴⁶ Other publications pointed out that democrats tended to be proponents of Grossdeutschland, contrasting with the ‘small German’ proclivities of liberals.⁴⁷

To many contemporaries, the distinction between democrats and liberals was blurred. Certainly, a radical such as Ludwig Bamberger, in exile in Paris but making regular trips to Germany, considered the political struggles of the 1860s, of which he felt himself a part, a liberal matter – ‘the great fight of the Prussian liberals’ – and an educated, middle-class one: ‘In the first half of the 60s, Germany and especially Prussia still stood under the banner of the military conflict [with the Bismarck administration], but, in spite of all the prosecutions of the press and breaches of the constitution, how free and lively the excitement of minds was, what an ideal impulse affected the whole of the educated Bürgertum.’⁵⁴ Bamberger’s contacts in Germany – Unruh, Oetker, Karl Mayer, Heinrich Simon, Jacoby – were liberal as well as democratic. As Jacoby spelled out in his two speeches on ‘the foundations of Prussian democracy’ in November 1858, radicals were compelled, not ‘to chase unattainable political ideals’, but to work ‘within the monarchical and constitutional form of government in the way offered by the constitution of the Prussian land’.⁵⁵ Other democrats such as Benedikt Waldeck agreed, abiding by the Prussian constitution and joining the Fortschrittspartei.⁵⁶ The main political division, it seemed, ran through the liberal camp, pitting – as Rössler lamented – ‘old liberals’ against Progressives, or it served to unite liberals and democrats against a common conservative foe, which backed Bismarck and Wilhelm I against the Abgeordnetenhaus.⁵⁷ To the Grenzboten, in 1861, it was evident that the liberal parties were split, as in 1848, and that the Fortschrittspartei had come to oppose ‘the previous liberal majority’ as ‘a collection of traitors’ or ‘academics’, ‘who know a lot, but desire little’.⁵⁸ The old distinctions were further confused by the fact that the liberals and some democrats, but not all, were monarchists.⁵⁹ From the other side of the traditional divide, the Social-Demokrat acknowledged that both liberals – ‘Gotha’ – and democrats in North Germany had united behind Kleindeutschland, reversing the ‘greater German’ democratic majority of 1849.⁶⁰ They were also eventually joined, the same newspaper conceded in January 1865, by South German democrats, leaving the ‘greater Germans’ a weak, right-wing rump.⁶¹ The only radicals still supporting Grossdeutschland were old democrats from central Germany, claimed the social-democratic publication.⁶² Despite alluding to different sources of disagreement between middle-class liberals and populist democrats, the Historisch-politische Blätter, which was initially in favour of ‘greater Germany’, likewise recognised that the two camps – democratic and liberal – had temporarily been reconciled in a joint renunciation of revolution, the princes and the notion of Grossdeutschland.⁶³

Democrats and liberals cooperated in the early 1860s by resurrecting their constitutional and political plan for a nation-state of 1849. For radicals such as Ludwig Walesrode, writing to Ferdinand Lassalle in July 1860, it was essential for ‘die Demokratie’ to ‘force the Gothaer’ towards ‘recognition of the revolution of 1848’.⁶⁴ The main foundation for such recognition, as a circular to democrats from Tafel, Adolph Rossmässler, Kolb, Christian Heldmann, Rudolf Christmann and Ludwig Reinhard in the summer of 1862 spelled out, was the Reichsverfassung of 1849, which was held still to be in force and legally binding:

In view of the attempt taking place to build an assembly, which is to be a Vorparlament in all but name, and in view of the entire situation of the fatherland, the challenge faces those members of parliament who are still in legal possession of their mandate to unite again, initially for a private conversation.

We are still the only ones who have received a mandate directly from the German nation. Not only is this mandate not yet formally dissolved, not only do we possess a special external right, before all others, to concern ourselves with the affairs of the fatherland – but it is also, after all that has happened and namely after a special parliamentary decision (from 30 April 1849…), our special duty carefully to keep all the political changes of the time in view and to this end to remain on alert.⁶⁵

Although the plan came to nought, Löwe, Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim and other radicals ‘not only returned to Germany’, with such ambitions in mind, ‘but to participation in a newly-awoken political life’, remarked Bamberger.⁶⁶ To Heinrich Simon shortly before his death in 1860, democrats should openly champion the Reich constitution of 1849 in order to alter the Nationalverein’s defensive stance: ‘it is … our duty to hold the banner high, around which all friends of the fatherland should unite. It was dearly won in the years 1848 and 1849: the German Reichsverfassung!’⁶⁷ ‘Until the German Volk has spoken in its second parliament’, there could be no other ‘legitimate banner for Germany’, he continued: ‘every other tends, consciously or unconsciously, towards particularist betrayal (Sonderbündelei), not towards the unification of Germany.’⁶⁸ After consulting with Jacoby and Tafel as surviving members of the Rump Parliament’s committee of fifteen ‘for implementing the Reichverfassung’, the leadership of the Nationalverein reported to the general meeting of 4 September 1860 that the time had not yet arrived to put forward ‘the Reich constitution as a banner’.⁶⁹

The majority of liberals, like the committee of the National Association, were well disposed towards a revival of the agreement of 1849, however, with even conservative-minded liberals such as Hermann Baumgarten and Karl Francke speaking in favour of its inclusion in the Nationalverein’s programme.⁷⁰ At the end of May 1860, Fedor Streit, although still not personally convinced of the wisdom of adopting the constitution, admitted that it ‘rests on a compromise of all parties’, that it was legally binding, that ‘no party can put up serious opposition to it (including the Prussians) in the current situation’, that it allowed the Nationalverein a way out of the ‘fatal question of [Prussian] hegemony’, and that ‘the masses’ would see it as a ‘shibboleth’, ‘if they should be put into motion’.⁷¹ Schulze-Delitzsch had written to Biedermann as early as June 1859 that the introduction of the Reich constitution would be ‘quite right’, in his opinion.⁷² To Adolf Seeger, it was tantamount to a Magna Carta of the German people.⁷³ As Vienna, together with assorted Grossdeutsche, attempted to organise a meeting in 1862, which even the radical critic of Berlin Jakob Venedey discounted as ‘an anti-parliament’, Streit and other leaders of the Nationalverein began to champion the Reichsverfassung: ‘They put forward an assembly of delegates – we demand the Reich constitution of 1849.’⁷⁴ In October 1862, the National Association adopted the reintroduction of the revolutionary constitution as its policy:

Only one thing corresponds to the legal consciousness of the nation and its demand for power and freedom: the implementation of the Reichsverfassung of 28 March 1849, complete with basic rights and electoral law, as they were decided by the legally elected representatives of the German Volk. To press, with seriousness and force, for the realisation of this law, above all the convocation of a parliament, elected according to the regulations of the Reich electoral law, is the task of the national party.⁷⁵

Copies of the constitution were disseminated throughout Germany, along with 25,000 pamphlets on its history and actual significance. Meetings to publicise its adoption were held in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Munich, Bremen, Osnabrück, Braunschweig, Hamburg, Breslau, Danzig, Frankfurt an der Oder, Königsberg, Stettin, Leipzig, Nassau, Heidelberg, Giessen, Mannheim, Pforzheim, Darmstadt, and Mülheim. The memory of 1849 was still vivid in 1862.

From a liberal point of view, democrats had come fully to accept the terms of their revolutionary agreement in March 1849.⁷⁶ In return for a German nation-state, a National Assembly, universal manhood suffrage, a German central government, and a merely suspensive veto for the Kaiser, the majority of radicals were willing to countenance the continuance of monarchy, a degree of federalism, the primacy of Prussia, and a constitutional regime of checks and balances vis-à-vis the executive. All of these elements had been present in March 1849, as the Frankfurt Parliament had voted for the Reich constitution and a Prussian Kaiser, but they had been opposed by a majority of democrats, as the Reichsverfassung scraped through a second reading by 267 votes to 263. Now, the agreement of most democrats appeared more whole-hearted, noted Unruh in August 1859. The talks at Eisenach leading to the foundation of the Nationalverein ‘conspicuously documented the greatest advances in political education and political tact in Germany’:

By designating themselves members of the earlier democratic party and by outlining a programme which every friend of the fatherland can join, the men who met in Eisenach wanted not only to get closer to other free-thinking parties, but to join together in a great national party … The difference between now and 1848 was clear for all to see: no theorising, no dogmatic adherence to abstract principles, above all no phrase-making, just moderation in the judgement of diverging opinions, a powerful desire and an acute apprehension of factual conditions. One recognises without contradiction that the old dispute about Gross- and Kleindeutschland is completely impractical, that only the unification of Germany through the leadership of Prussia, with the exclusion of Austria and its German provinces, can be striven for.⁷⁷

In Unruh’s opinion, democrats – and public opinion more generally – could be persuaded to tolerate a Prussian-led unification of Germany, in all likelihood during wartime.⁷⁸

Radicals themselves were often more sceptical than the liberal leader realised, continuing to express ‘empathy’ for ‘the greater German standpoint’, in the words of the forty-eighter and mayor of Harburg August Grumbrecht.⁷⁹ Yet most conceded ‘realistically’, like Grumbrecht, that schemes to include the Habsburg monarchy in Germany were ‘fantasies’.⁸⁰ When pressed, the leaders of the Nationalverein had explained that Austria was not formally excluded from Germany, but that it did not appear to wish to be included.⁸¹ Likewise, the organising committee of the Abgeordnetentag, which included members with democratic backgrounds such as Hugo Fries, August Metz, Julius Hölder and Moritz Wiggers, allowed its moderate Badenese liberal chair Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to work towards the voluntary exclusion of Austrian deputies in 1862 because it could not see how Habsburg territories could take part in German unification. The majority of democrats, most of whom supported the Abgeordnetentag, effectively sanctioned this decision, with the radical press in states such as Württemberg coming to label the organisation ‘freisinnig’ rather than ‘kleindeutsch’, as in the past, and the meetings of the Reformverein ‘reaktionär’ instead of ‘grossdeutsch’.⁸² The symbols of the Abgeordnetentag, especially the assembly of August 1863 in the huge exhibition hall of the Frankfurt Museumsgesellschaft, were deliberately reminiscent of the Frankfurt Parliament, with speakers flanked by two large black, red and gold flags. It was referred to by Bennigsen in 1862 as the Staatenhaus, with the Nationalverein as the Volkshaus, of the future German Bundesstaat envisaged in the Reich constitution of 1849.⁸³

The career of Ferdinand Lassalle reveals the extent to which democrats had compromised with liberals. The later founder of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV), who changed his name from ‘Lassal’ to ‘Lassalle’ in homage to the French revolution, was contemptuous of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and of liberalism, partly as a reaction to his father, who was a liberal Jewish manufacturer in Breslau: ‘He wants to let me study and outlines the pervasive holy idea that he calls liberalism! As if it was not precisely this which pushes me to study, this which I want to fight and without which I would have rather stayed what I am!’⁸⁴ As soon as the ‘iron pressure’ of the reaction relented slightly in 1858, the ‘people here swarm for the new era and a conscientious prince and the law-abiding administration which has now come into being’, he wrote to Karl Marx.⁸⁵ Even the Volks-Zeitung, ‘the sole half-democratic paper’, had become a government mouthpiece: ‘All that expresses itself is this bourgeois cretinism’, ran his report to Marx, who was, ‘by the by, extraordinarily pleased’ by it.⁸⁶ Liberals like ‘Herr Julian Schmidt, der Literaturhistoriker’, in the title of his satirical essay of March 1862, were typical of the ‘mob of literati’ which controlled the press and, therefore, political expression: they were ‘a band of unknowing and thoughtless Buben, too ignorant to be elementary school teachers, too incapable and lazy to be postal clerks, and thus believing themselves called upon to pursue literature and the education of the Volk! They all too often dictate the great words of literature and politics, in newspapers and journals.’⁸⁷ To Lassalle, Wilhelm Adolf Lette, the President of the Prussian second chamber whom the radical had met at the Berlin Philosophical Society in 1857, characterised the weakness of liberal ‘opposition’: ‘I could not depict our entire misery in the chamber more clearly in microcosm than in this well-meaning, waffling, weak little man.’⁸⁸

Liberals seemed superficial and ineffective, without principles or a sense of historical movement. Like Marx, with whom he collaborated on the radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung in the late 1840s and with whom he corresponded in the 1850s and early 1860s, Lassalle was convinced by his reading of Hegel that history would move with certainty to an absolute end, benefiting a universal class of producers. ‘I especially, who have been schooled in the Hegelian school, know best how one must, above all, wait for the right time’, he ruminated in the 1840s, asserting that ‘an individual can contribute to the quickening of an event in no other way than by spreading education and philosophy’.⁸⁹ Like other left-wing Hegelians, he doubted that the real or extant was rational, preferring to question the legitimacy of existing institutions and to test commonplace assumptions. Thus, his System der erworbenen Rechte (1861) showed how property and other ‘rights’ in positive law, all of which were condoned by liberals, were neither natural nor unalterable, but were contingent on society and historical development, to be superseded by ‘will’, power and the actions of a revolutionary state. As Lassalle accepted the logic of this position and took up the offer of Leipzig workers to form what became the ADAV, he recognised that he might become ‘a dead man’ to liberals and democrats, with the Fortschrittspartei rejoicing over his decision, ‘since the bourgeoisie is very clear about it’.⁹⁰

Lassalle’s break with liberal and democratic milieux only occurred in 1863, however. Before making his decision, he canvassed the opinion of the democrat Franz Ziegler and the correspondent of the National-Zeitung Lothar Bucher: the former – ‘only a political revolutionary and otherwise bourgeois’ – advised him against leaving democratic circles within the Nationalverein and Fortschrittspartei on pain of becoming ‘a dead man’ and ruining himself forever; the latter was more circumspect, but he had already made up his own mind by moving towards the right, prior to being employed as an adviser by Bismarck in 1864.⁹¹ Until the previous year, Lassalle had maintained contact with those on the democratic left and had generally referred to himself as a democrat.⁹² He was critical of the Communist League’s ‘game of revolution with the workers’, which ‘serves no purpose’ other than awakening ‘their worst appetites’ without any prospect of success, as he noted retrospectively in 1860.⁹³ Although disdainful of liberals, Lassalle was willing to join them in a common opposition. In 1848–49, he was – between spells in jail (February–August 1848, November 1848–July 1849) as a result of his involvement in the custody battles and divorce proceedings of Sophie von Hatzfeld – part of a broad democratic movement in Düsseldorf which included civil servants, artists such as the painter Lorenz Clasen, and merchants like Lorenz Cantador, who led the democrats. Meetings were moderate and national in tone, taking place under a black, red and gold banner, not republican or communist, as the Düsseldorfer Journal remarked:

Herr Ferdinand Lassalle explained in the name of the Volksklub that he considered it necessary strenuously to deny the rumour that the Volksklub wanted to use the current crisis for the purpose of a red republic. At the present moment, it is a question of something quite different, it is a question of the protection of common freedoms, for the maintenance of which all parties must work together.⁹⁴

During the ‘New Era’, after he had finally received permission to reside in Berlin indefinitely in 1859, Lassalle continued to cultivate his democratic contacts, living for a time with the radical publisher Franz Duncker – the brother of the head of the Prussian ‘literary bureau’, Max – and distancing himself from Marx’s accusation in 1860 that the democratic leader Carl Vogt was a Bonapartist spy. Unlike Marx, he was willing to appear in the Demokratische Studien, published by the Hamburg radical Ludwig Walesrode, alongside Vogt and other democrats such as Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim. Walesrode’s aim, which he spelled out to Lassalle in 1860, was to prompt liberals to recognise the revolution and to ‘join us on the ground of the Reichsverfassung’, allowing ‘the German Volk to become one through its basic rights’ and encouraging the promotion of unity by ‘the decidedly democratic press’.⁹⁶ Despite opposing the Reich constitution for its espousal of the principle of hereditary monarchy and for perpetuating a cult of legality, obscuring the fact that law merely reflected temporary relations of power, Lassalle went along with Walesrode’s project and, if later rumours are to be believed, even toyed with the idea of standing as a Progressive deputy.⁹⁷ Certainly, he had entertained the possibility of standing as a democratic candidate for Düsseldorf in the Prussian second chamber in 1858, confident of winning the whole of the third class of voters and three-quarters of the second class, as he put it to Hatzfeld in a moment of self-delusion.⁹⁸ Whether in his unsuccessful attempt to persuade the liberal publishers Hermann and Eduard Brockhaus to resurrect the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1862 or in the identification of what Marx termed ‘a dwarf like Schulze-Delitzsch’ as ‘the central point of his agitation’ on behalf of the committee of Leipzig workers in 1863, Lassalle continued to define himself with reference to ‘democracy’ and the ‘national opposition’.⁹⁹

Nations would, in the spirit of Mazzini, whom Lassalle much admired, coexist naturally, as powerful national cultures – activated by a coherent Volksgeist – imposed themselves through assimilation and, if necessary, by force at the expense of weaker entities. The Habsburg monarchy had failed in this respect and was doomed to disintegrate, ending a damaging dualism in Germany and making way for a Prussian-led nation-state. ‘We have a striking example of how Austria is capable of assimilation,’ Lassalle asserted: ‘We refer to Bohemia’s suffocated Volksgeist! What has become of this land, the mother of Protestantism, the cradle of the wars of the Hussites, the birthplace of the thirty-years’ war of faith, what has become of it after hundreds of years of possession? The answer is: ‘A suffocated, cowed Volksgeist.’¹⁰³ Although he acknowledged that ‘in modern times’ – ‘when subjectivity and individualism, education and scepticism etc. have loosened this strict unity and convergence of the moral views of the Volksgeist present in individuals’ – ‘the ethical awareness of individuals belonging to the same state’ had become fragmented and reliant on the hazard of reason and chance achievements instead of a ‘general ethos of the Volk’, he visibly regretted its absence and sought to shore up a national collectivity.¹⁰⁴ What was needed, he declared in a lecture ‘Über Verfassungen’ in April 1862, was to ‘transform the real, actual relations of power in the land, to intervene in the executive, to intervene so much and transform it to such an extent that it will never again on its own be able to stand against the will of the nation – that was what was required at that time [in 1848 in Prussia], and what had been needed beforehand, so that a written constitution can endure’.¹⁰⁵ Since he was doubtful that simply sending ‘a national parliament to Frankfurt again’ would be able ‘to make the impossible possible’, he came to back the use of the Prussian state, even exalting a figure such as Friedrich the Great, to unify Germany or, at least, to entangle it in a war with France from which democracy would emerge stronger and ‘the forces of the Volk’ would be needed by the state.¹⁰⁶ Whereas ‘Austria destroys Germany, Prussia and Germany complement each other’, Lassalle concluded, echoing many other democrats and the majority of liberals.¹⁰⁷

Liberals and liberalism dominated the revival of politics in German states after 1858 by promoting the establishment of a German nation-state according to a plan agreed in 1848–49. Even sceptical left-wing democrats such as Lassalle were convinced by these national elements of the liberal programme. Liberal notables such as Bennigsen, Bluntschli, Lette, Hansemann and Beckerath ran the principal national associations – the Nationalverein, the Abgeordnetentag, the Juristentag, the Kongress Deutscher Volkswirte and the Deutscher Handelstag – and liberal activists were preponderant in the organisations’ committees. Their domination of national politics appeared to be social, political and economic. Sociologically, both the leadership and membership of the national associations and liberal parties came largely from the Bürgertum, granting them coherence, education and increasing wealth. At least 70 per cent of Fortschrittspartei deputies in 1862 were drawn from the civil service, liberal professions or commerce. One consequence was that the national and liberal milieu as a whole was perceived to be middle-class (see Table 5.5). Even during the revolution, the Grenzboten had noted in 1850, liberalism had been founded on the objectives of a single stratum whereas ‘so-called democracy’ had tried to represent those of several strata, leading to contradiction and conflict.¹⁰⁸ Party affiliations had been confused during and after the revolution, claimed the same publication in 1854, but anti-noble sentiment in the middle classes was deeply entrenched, helping to define liberalism, and class conflicts between middle-class liberals and lower-order democrats dictated policy and political oppositions in cities such as Leipzig.¹⁰⁹ After 1858, as liberal organisations began to cast themselves in a more inclusive light, such comments became less frequent in the liberal press, although they were concealed in injunctions to new, purportedly liberal ministries to oppose both feudal – or noble – and anarchist – or working-class – forces.¹¹⁰

In private, liberals were more candid, with Elben admitting of Stuttgart, for example, that ‘the party system was very simple’ in the 1850s, consisting of ‘a victorious reaction’ opposed by ‘a liberal Bürgertum’.¹¹¹ The latter was ‘newly strengthened’ in the ‘New Era’, sometimes called ‘liberal’ and sometimes ‘progressive’, but its composition remained fundamentally unaltered (see Tables 5.5 and 5.6).¹¹² Those outside liberal circles confirmed such facts in a less flattering fashion. ‘At the beginning of the constitutional system in Prussia, this inner division of the Volk into bourgeoisie and people did not yet exist, or at least not in the same measure as today,’ remarked the Historisch-politische Blätter in 1855:

Then, subordinate circles viewed the merchant, the factory lord and the great landowner as their natural representatives, because of their greater education and familiarity with their relations; they expected from these the representation of their own interests, and they joined without a second thought their liberal tendency and constitutional policy in the belief that these matters and endeavours were true and were also good for the Volk and its real needs. This opinion has gradually changed.¹¹³

Liberals’ pursuit of the ‘egoistic class interests’ of the Bürgertum had estranged them from the rest of the population, rejoiced the Catholic publication, ‘so that they no longer truly live in the Volksgemeinschaft.’¹¹⁴ Gotha, repeated the publication ten years later, had become detached from the Volk, limited to civil servants and other members of the middle classes, yet it got on with no one precisely ‘because it wants to be all in everything’.¹¹⁵ To this end, the ‘bourgeoisie’ was even prepared to profit from the Prussian three-class franchise, which had given all ‘political influence to one class, and indeed to the greediest and most unreliable one’.¹¹⁶ Liberals appeared to have benefited from the class solidarity and increasing prosperity of the German middle classes. To their opponents, such class solidarity was likely in future to lead to isolation. To liberal supporters, solidarity facilitated the extension of the universal claims of the Bürgertum – particularly civil servants – to society as a whole.

the national feeling of the Germans re-emerged forcefully, as it always surfaces and imposes itself when a crisis breaks out. The liberals recognised this and they therefore immediately strengthened themselves through their sentiment for the fatherland. Such sentiment had no representatives, and as the liberal party put itself forward as such, it was quickly forgotten that it had earlier not recognised German interests. From then on, it soon appeared to the masses (die Masse) to be the opponent of arbitrariness, the protector of freedom and the representative of the national unity of the Germans, and it was joined by thousands upon thousands of highly honourable men, whose noble disposition outweighed the sharpness of their reason. Here lay the greatest strength of the party from now on.¹¹⁸

The fortunes of the liberal party subsequently waxed and waned, with liberals failing to harness the revolution in 1848 but benefiting from the unpopularity of particularism during ‘The Interregnum of the Reaction’, as one article put it in 1858.¹¹⁹ Nationalism had been a mere theory in the early nineteenth century: liberals had popularised it and extended it to the realm of the state, with officials becoming liberal instruments in the process.¹²⁰ Since the states of the third Germany were not ‘capable of life’, the liberal party had backed Prussia from the revolution onwards, using its old foil of an impotent German Confederation with increasingly devastating effect ‘because the national feeling of the Germans is more defined and more powerful than it was before’.¹²¹ In a parallel movement, liberal parties had gained power state by state after 1830, first in the South and then in the North, partly by exploiting national phraseology in a demagogical and cynical way.

Having conquered the individual German lands through the ballot box, it was now in the liberal interest to demand a national assembly, which would give it power in the whole of Germany, declared the Historisch-politische Blätter in 1864.¹²² To the Catholic periodical, this rise of liberalism was the result of chance, not historical inevitability: liberals had gained support because of opposition to absolutism, the mistakes of individual governments, the lack of alternative organised parties, middle-class anxiety about revolution and democracy after 1848, criticism of particularism, fear of a French invasion in the 1850s and, especially, ‘the most pressing desire of each German who loved his fatherland and who had a feeling for the honour of his nation (Nation)’ that Germany ‘would become strong and powerful, that the tribes would unite, and that the federal states would fashion themselves into one power’.¹²³ None of these events, or their exploitation by liberals, were inevitable, noted an article in 1866, yet they had ensured that liberalism had come to the fore throughout Germany during the New Era.¹²⁴ Although emphasising the natural affinity between liberal and national ideas, most of the liberal press concurred with the substance of this analysis: liberals had become politically dominant by the late 1850s because of their support for a ‘small German’ nation-state.¹²⁵ In the critical election of 1861 in Prussia, both the Grenzboten and the National-Zeitung agreed with the decision of the ‘out-and-out liberals’ to put the nation-state first: ‘We fully agree that the German question is placed at the top of the agenda; the centre of gravity of Prussian Progress is to be found here.’¹²⁶

The Zollverein and the Economics of Unification

Economic cooperation, promoted by Prussia, appeared to presage national unity. For this reason, the writings of the economist Friedrich List provided an ‘arsenal of weapons for one of today’s parties, but also for the others’, since his aim was ‘to educate the nation until it could stand at the side of the other nations with the same rights’.¹³¹ List had argued for free trade within a protected German market until German goods could compete with those of neighbouring states, after which point free trade could be extended across Europe. ‘Thus, the tariff and toll borders in the interior of Germany, which treat the inhabitants of the other German states and of foreign states equally, must be regarded as constraints which allow the emergence neither of national well-being nor of national sentiment’, ran an article in the same periodical in 1863: ‘The freeing of indigenous industry, its rise to the level on which England stood, whose superiority List enviously admired rather than detested, was the practical goal of all his efforts which he saw in conjunction with – and as almost identical to – the political unification of the fatherland.’¹³² The economist, continued the Grenzboten, had given ‘the general, in many respects unclear, urge towards progress a real, practical content, and vague, for the most part Frenchifying, liberalism a genuinely national foundation’, prophesying ‘that economic unification must necessarily lead to national unity’.¹³³ The converse, however, was also true: economic ties were in themselves meaningless and fragile without a nation-state to protect and harness them. ‘What are all these efforts worth, whether we are rulers or the ruled, from the aristocratic or bürgerlich order, soldiers or civilians, manufacturers, agriculturalists or merchants, without nationality and without a guarantee of the continuation of our nationality!’, the article asked rhetorically.¹³⁴

However ‘imposing’ and ‘full of life’ Austria was, it did not share ‘our spirit, our interests, our background and education, our hopes and desires’; Prussia, by contrast, had the potential to extend a ‘Zollverein to the whole of Germany’, to create a navy and a German parliament.¹³⁵ Most commentators concurred that the purpose of Prussia’s championing of the Zollverein was political: to opponents such as Anton Edmund Wollheim da Fonseca, employed by the Austrian government, Berlin was acting cynically towards the political end of its own aggrandisement in Germany, damaging the industry and commercial interests of many German states without strengthening their ‘material forces’ and safeguarding ‘their political independence’; to supporters such as the liberal deputy and National-Zeitung journalist Otto Michaelis, speaking on behalf of the Prussian Landtag commission on trade, finances and tariffs in 1862, Prussia was acting ‘as a state and as a Volk’ with ‘a German vocation’; likewise, to conservative correspondents of the Kreuzzeitung, Prussia alone was powerful enough to consolidate the links between the German states, to prop up an ailing Bund and to create German organisations outside the Confederation such as the Customs’ Union.¹³⁶ Even publications like the Berliner Revue which did not believe that Germany could be unified, so different were the North and the South, nevertheless acknowledged that the Prussian government had created an internal market ‘because it was believed that the basis of a future political unity could be found in the Zollverein’.¹³⁷

Public opinion in most German states, although hardly uniform, backed a Prussian-led Zollverein as a matter of economic interest and as a precursor of national unity. Although the economic ‘rise’ of Prussia was not clear-cut, on the basis of statistics published at the time, the impression that the Habsburg monarchy was in economic difficulty or decline was widely believed (see Table 5.7). Public opinion was supported in its convictions about the economy by the German Handelstag, the Kongress deutscher Volkswirte and the Nationalverein, whose Wochenschrift declared in 1860 that the creation of a German market ‘must, in return, have a unifying and reinforcing effect on the union of German state politics’.¹³⁸ North German states like Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg and Hanover, which had joined the Customs’ Union as late as 1854 for financial reasons, seemed to have little option but to back Berlin, however sceptical some sections of their populations were of Prussia.¹³⁹ ‘As in the national question, so in the tariff question, the German nation will have to transfer leadership to Prussia, for without Prussia’s powerful support it will have to postpone its hopes of victory indefinitely,’ wrote the democrat Moritz Wiggers from Rostock: ‘Luckily, in this question too, the interests of Prussia go hand in hand with those of the German nation.’¹⁴⁰ Badenese opinion seems to have followed the pro-Prussian line of its government.¹⁴¹ Saxon deputies, despite opposition from protectionist landowners, supported the stance of the Interior Minister Richard von Friesen, trusting that he would ‘do everything to maintain the Zollverein’ in 1852.¹⁴² Friesen’s superior, the Foreign Minister and later Minister-President, Ferdinand von Beust was more critical of Prussia, but he acknowledged – according to his recollections – ‘the disadvantages, indeed the impossibility, of withdrawing from the Zollverein with Prussia’.¹⁴³ In 1862, the debate was much more one-sided, with the majority of deputies following the lead of the government – since Beust and Friesen now agreed with each other – in recognising the Franco-Prussian free-trade agreement in advance of other German states. As the liberal forty-eighter Robert Georgi put it in his report on behalf of both chambers of the Saxon parliament, Austria was not prevented by the agreement from entering the German Customs’ Union, but if it was not in a position to do so, which seemed likely, ‘the material loss for the Zollverein and especially for Saxony would not be very significant’ because ‘reciprocal trade, even now, is not at all extensive’.¹⁴⁴ Although Saxon leaders were surprised in 1862 when Württemberg and Bavaria did not follow suit and back Prussia’s trade agreement with France, with the majority of the public supporting their respective governments, they were reassured by later divisions of opinion – with four out of seven of Württemberg’s delegates at the Deutscher Handelstag in October 1862 voting for the agreement – and by resigned public acceptance of the continuation of the Zollverein on Prussian terms, for want of a better alternative.¹⁴⁵

The reputation which Austria still enjoyed at that time, its entire influence over German affairs, rested simply on the existence of the German Bund. The purely negative policy of Emperor Franz in the last phase of his government, whose main aim was to leave everything as it was domestically and to arrest – as much as possible – the new ideas, which preoccupied the world, at the Austrian border; the later, so light-headed financial policy of Bruck, who did virtually nothing to increase the productive forces of Austria … looking on calmly at the relentlessly advancing financial collapse of the Reich instead … finally, the unclear, perpetually vacillating and contradictory policy which Austria pursued after 1849 both abroad and at home – all this destroyed almost every sympathy for Austria in the public opinion of Germany and, more than all the efforts of Prussia, led to the alienation of the German people (Volk) from Austria and its movement towards an embrace with Prussia, which alone could be trusted to be capable of reasonably promoting the material interests of Germany and of having the power to realise national ideas.¹⁴⁶

Even to a minister in one of the most pro-Austrian governments of the middling states, which constituted the principal source of opposition to Berlin in the 1850s and 1860s, there seemed to be little economic and political alternative to Prussian leadership in Germany over the long term. Such a realisation, however reluctant, characterised most sections of public opinion throughout the German lands. It could be seen in the muted and ambiguous public criticism of ‘Prussia’ during the rancorous constitutional crisis of the 1860s.

Bismarck and the Constitutional Crisis

Little over a year later, the introduction by the Prussian War Minister Albrecht von Roon of a bill to increase the size of the army, lengthen military service to three years and disperse the more civic-spirited Landwehr, which was rejected by the Abgeordnetenhaus and then imposed by royal decree, appeared to have brought Prussia’s liberal, constitutional and national credentials into question. The escalation of the crisis in 1860 and 1861 helped the opposition to victory in the elections of December 1861, with the liberals gaining 141 seats and the newly formed Fortschrittspartei 109, and in those of May 1862, in which the left centre, Progressive Party and other opponents of the government won 285 seats out of 352 seats (see Table 5.8). It also precipitated the fall of the liberal-conservative ministry of Auerswald in March 1862 and the eventual appointment of the ultra-reactionary Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen in September with the intention of pursuing the reform of the military – according to Bismarck’s recollection of his interview with the King – ‘even if against the majority of the Landtag and its decisions’.¹⁴⁹ The Bismarck administration and the Abgeordnetenhaus remained locked in conflict until the Minister-President’s Indemnity Bill of July 1866, during the war against Austria, which signalled a return to constitutional government in exchange for a parliamentary renunciation of retribution vis-à-vis the ministry. The question was: how seriously did these events damage Prussia’s reputation as a champion of unification? How were the Prussian government and Prussian society perceived, and how were national-minded and liberal ‘public opinion’ and political parties viewed by Bismarck and other ministers? Since the debate about the constitution of a national polity had become the pivotal component of German unification after 1848, it was imperative that Prussia could be conceived of as a constitutional state.

Wilhelm was shaped by his education in the army, which he had entered at the age of ten. In 1849, he had been made Governor General of the Rhineland and, in 1854, Governor of the Bund fortress of Mainz. According to Article 108 of the Prussian constitution of 1850, the army was not to take an oath to the constitution, but continued to swear ‘a bodily oath’ to the flag, pledging to serve the King of Prussia ‘in all cases’.¹⁵⁴ The military sphere remained separate from politics in Wilhelm’s mind as a solely royal prerogative. It was no coincidence that constitutional conflict in Prussia, which drove the new King to the point of abdication in 1862 rather than giving in to what he considered illegitimate parliamentary incursions into the jurisdiction of the monarch, centred on the reform of the army. The Regent’s voluntary oath to the constitution in 1858, which Friedrich Wilhelm IV had advised against, in no way altered such a state of affairs, in Wilhelm’s opinion, since the military was not a constitutional matter.

Bismarck concurred with the King that the ministers of Auerswald’s administration had unjustifiably ‘subjected themselves and [Wilhelm] to a parliamentary majority’.¹⁵⁵ In his interview with Wilhelm in September 1862 at Babelsberg, he was anxious to portray the conflict – even if with some exaggeration as a result of hindsight – as more than a party squabble over the extent of parliamentary scrutiny and the royal power of command over the army: ‘I succeeded in convincing him that it was not a conservative or liberal question for him, of this or that hue, but concerned a monarchical regime or parliamentary rule, and that the latter was of necessity to be avoided, also by means of a period of dictatorship.’¹⁵⁶ Bismarck would ‘rather fall with the king’, ‘even if Your Majesty should order something which I did not hold to be right’, than ‘leave Your Majesty in the lurch in a struggle with parliamentary rule’.¹⁵⁷ This fear of a ‘parliamentary regime’ had initially prompted Roon in June 1862, with the sanction of the King, to write to Bismarck in Paris, where he was a Prussian envoy, and to enquire about his willingness to become a minister.¹⁵⁸ Bismarck’s reply on 2 July affirmed that he would remain true to his Prince ‘up to and into the Vendée’ of counter-revolution.¹⁵⁹ He believed that the Prussian government had been too ‘liberal’ and ‘constitutional’ at home and too ‘legitimistic’ abroad; his advice was to stand up to the opposition and ‘to break with the chamber’, dissolving it in order ‘to show the nation how the king stands with respect to the people (zu den Leuten)’.¹⁶⁰ Promising to depart for Germany immediately, he refrained from ‘putting on paper much of what I want to say’, probably because it was more extreme.¹⁶¹

Bismarck was already by that time well-known in conservative circles for his unorthodoxy, having been a more traditional reactionary during the revolution. His admission to Roon that his anti-legitimist ‘way of thinking’ in foreign policy was ‘so distant from that of our most gracious ruler’ as to disqualify him from office went back to a dispute with the Gerlachs in the mid-1850s about the merits of Napoleon III.¹⁶² Although he justifiably protested to Leopold von Gerlach that he was not a ‘Bonapartist’ wishing to combine new social forces in a plebiscitary fashion on the basis of the revolution, he was willing to cooperate with Napoleon diplomatically, against the ‘legitimate’ conservative powers of Austria and Russia, and to consider novel domestic alliances and forms of government. Certainly, he had given up his earlier hope of acting as the representative of a restored aristocratic, corporate, divine-right monarchy, cleansed of bureaucracy and absolutism, and he was willing, as his discussions with King Wilhelm showed, to contemplate the possibility of ‘dictatorship’. ‘One can accomplish a great deal even under a constitution by such ordinary means as fear, enticement and the like,’ Bismarck declared to Ludwig von Gerlach in November 1862: ‘If nothing avails, one can still resort to a coup d’état.’¹⁶³ During his first year in office, the Minister-President attempted to discipline ‘political’ civil servants, including the 40 per cent of Prussian deputies who were officials in 1862, to prevent soldiers from voting, and to muzzle the liberal press through the royal edict of June 1863, which granted the administration the power to ban – after two warnings – publications displaying a ‘general attitude’ ‘dangerous to public welfare’.¹⁶⁴ To the liberal Crown Prince, who had publicly criticised Bismarck’s press edict, the Minister-President lamented that the King believed in his oath to the constitution and that ministers acted ‘conscientiously’ in adhering to the letter of the Verfassung. ‘What if conscience bids me not to respect it?’ he asked provocatively.¹⁶⁵ Such a modern and unpredictable – but still uncompromisingly royalist and Prussian – stance understandably worried national-minded constitutionalists and liberals.

The majority of Prussian politicians criticised Bismarck’s break with the constitution and refused to cooperate with the government. To Twesten, speaking in one of the main debates about the reform of the army on 16 September 1862, a few days before the Parisian envoy’s appointment as Minister-President, it was already evident that the government ‘wants subjugation sans phrase to its will or it desires a conflict’.¹⁷³ In liberal circles too, he contended, it was said that the constitution should be put to the test, even at the risk of its failure. When Bismarck had attended the budget committee of the Abgeordnetenhaus on 30 September, having accepted the minister-presidency on 22 September, he had spoken informally, partly in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the deputies, digressing in what Roon called ‘witty sallies’ and revealing his anti-liberal Realpolitik at the same time as hinting at a domestic truce through the inclusion of moderate liberals in government, a possible two-year period of military service and a renunciation of the lower chamber’s budgetary control over the army:

It is not to Prussia’s liberalism that Germany looks, but to its power; let Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden indulge in liberalism, no one will give them Prussia’s part for that; Prussia must collect and keep its strength for the right moment, which has been missed several times already; Prussia’s frontiers as laid down by the Vienna treaties are not conducive to a healthy national life; it is not by means of speeches and majority resolutions that the great issues of the day will be decided – that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood.¹⁷⁴

The Minister-President’s fabricated levity and forthrightness was interpreted by deputies – and liberals outside parliament – as crudeness, cynicism and reaction. ‘You know how passionately I love Prussia’, wrote Heinrich von Treitschke to his brother-in-law: ‘But when I hear so shallow a country squire as this Bismarck bragging about the “iron and blood’ with which he intends to subdue Germany, the meanness of it seems to me to be exceeded only by the absurdity.’¹⁷⁵ Inside the committee room, the academic and liberal grandee Rudolf Virchow accused Bismarck of trying to attain his impliedly reactionary domestic aims through the distractions of foreign policy and the exercise of power. The Minister-President was forced to backtrack, protesting – too loudly – that ‘to seek conflicts abroad in order to get over difficulties at home … would be frivolous; he was not looking for deals; he was talking about conflicts that we would not be able to avoid, without our having sought them’.¹⁷⁶

Such denials merely reinforced the sense of liberals like Max von Forckenbeck, the chair of the budget committee, that Prussia faced the ‘rule of the sword at home’ and ‘war abroad’ under Bismarck, as he predicted on 24 September, as news of the new Minister-President was published in the press.¹⁷⁷ This belief that the Prussian government was acting unconstitutionally, although varying in intensity, remained in place until the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. ‘We ought not to maintain any longer that the constitution is still in effect,’ wrote Twesten in that year, concurring with Leopold von Hoverbeck that ‘force has destroyed the law’ and with Eduard Lasker that ‘in almost every respect the country is being governed absolutely in the true sense of the word’.¹⁷⁸ To Twesten and many other liberals and democrats, the constitutional crisis was underpinned by a conflict ‘between Junkertum and Volk’, with a feudal, ‘closed and decisive representation of the interests of a small party’ of conservative landowners, willing to contravene the law, pitted against the Bürgertum, which ‘represents the material and ideal interests with which the working and thinking Volk is filled, the classes of the Volk which have been in the process of rising since the end of the Middle Ages and which have always had moral power and which sooner or later will, in our state too, also have political power in their hands’.¹⁷⁹ Bismarck, it seemed to the opposition, did not embody the anticipated civic and constitutional politics of a German nation-state.

Observers outside Prussia, who were often already wary of Berlin, were even more sceptical of Bismarck than their Prussian counterparts. In Baden, the traditional support of Prussia in the South, the pro-Prussian liberal Foreign Minister Franz von Roggenbach warned his envoy at the Bundestag Robert von Mohl on 3 October 1862 that ‘the man and the system must be attacked without quarter’.¹⁸⁰ ‘The only thing left for us to do is to keep alive the national idea and to give it greater substance in the convictions of the nation, in spite of its complete rejection by the Prussian government,’ wrote Karl Samwer to Roggenbach on 17 October: ‘In this respect, I believe your plan to oppose the vacuous ideas of reform of the Austrians and the Mittelstaaten with the image of the Reichsverfassung of 1849 to be excellent.’¹⁸¹ After the rebuttal of the Grand Duke’s attempt to warn Wilhelm, who was celebrating the birthday of the Queen at Baden-Baden, about Bismarck and Prussia’s change of course, the official Karlsruher Zeitung spelled out the Badenese government’s ‘Position vis-à-vis the Prussian Constitutional Crisis’ on 22 October: although the Prussian administration had been entrusted by nationalists with ‘our political rebirth’ since 1859, ‘a government which does not respect its own parliament cannot create a German parliament, and without the will of the German Volk German unity will not be founded’.¹⁸² Although Roggenbach was subsequently won over by Bismarck’s policy in Schleswig-Holstein and Germany more generally, he was unable to convince the Grand Duke and was opposed by Georg Ludwig von Edelsheim and the majority of Badenese liberals, prompting him to stand down as Foreign Minister and Minister of State on 7 October 1865. Edelsheim replaced him a fortnight later.

Liberals and democrats in other South German states, traditionally less well disposed to Prussia, were more forthright in their criticism of the Prussian Minister-President. In Württemberg, for instance, the Prussian Legationsrat in Stuttgart had already warned Berlin in April 1862 that ‘Bismarck as a minister would, with one blow, isolate Prussia in Germany.’¹⁸³ After his appointment, not only the democratic Beobachter was scathing about the new Bismarckian era, even accusing the Prussian Progressives of having been ‘most profoundly altered and corrupted’ in their ‘whole sense of legality’, moderate liberal newspapers like the Schwäbische Zeitung and the Schwäbischer Merkur were also suspicious of the new administration, though not averse to its ‘unheard-of recognition that power is power’, portraying its leader as a ‘fantasist in the grand style’ without the ‘tough stamina’ of a great statesman.¹⁸⁴ Bismarck, noted the owner of the Merkur Otto Elben, was seen as a ‘real Junker’ who had alienated ‘all liberals of the old school from Prussia’ through measures such as the press edict.¹⁸⁵ Notwithstanding its call for a ‘German Cavour’, a ‘powerful and liberal statesman in Austria or Prussia’, the Schwäbische Volkszeitung did not discern such a figure in Bismarck, discounting him as ‘personified presumption and immorality’.¹⁸⁶ These antipathies, together with long-standing South German sympathy for Austria, informed the call of the Volkszeitung and Merkur for a policy of armed neutrality on the part of the third Germany on the eve of the Austro-Prussian war. Supporters of Prussia such as Gustav Rümelin, who had written to his brother-in-law Gustav Schmoller that the ‘expansion of Prussia’s power and size’ was ‘historically grounded, natural and desirable, even in terms of German interests’, rejected Bismarck’s bellicose policy.¹⁸⁷ Friedrich Notter wrote in his diary on 29 June 1866, two days after Prussia’s setback in the battle of Langensalza, that, ‘as much as I am for Prussia, I have a sort of joy over this defeat, because it will hopefully summon forth the alteration of a mad Bismarckian policy. It is just the same for most friends of Prussia, the number of whom is greater than I had thought, as for me.’¹⁸⁸ For its part, the Schwäbische Chronik, the supplement of the Merkur, held that the victory of Prussia under Bismarck’s leadership would lead to the ‘moral decline of Germany’.¹⁸⁹

By contrast, ‘Prussia’ without Bismarck, although not popular in many parts of the South, was usually seen by liberals – and by many others – to be compatible with a German nation-state. To some South German observers, the constitutional crisis of the Hohenzollern state had served to emphasise the difference between a reactionary government and a liberal populace and public sphere, creating sympathy for the latter. ‘The advantages of the changed situation, too, cannot be overlooked,’ commented the Karlsruher Zeitung after Bismarck’s appointment in 1862:

The struggle of the Prussians for their constitution wins over the sympathies of the whole of liberal Germany more easily and more surely than anything else, and in Prussia the conviction impresses itself more deeply by the day that internal freedom there will only be secured against an overpowerful Junkertum when the anachronisms of Kurbrandenburg will have become forever impossible within a great German Bundesstaat.¹⁹⁰

Not all South German publications were so sympathetic. One of the most critical was the Bavarian and Catholic periodical, the Historisch-politische Blätter. Yet, even here, there was increasing, if still grudging, support for Prussia between 1862 and 1866, in spite of the constitutional crisis. In the past, Prussia had been viewed as an expansionist, centralised, martial, Protestant state and an enemy of the third Germany and the Bund.¹⁹¹ The Crimean and Franco-Austrian wars had demonstrated that Prussia, playing the part – in the words of the Austrian note of 5 November 1861 – of ‘the egotistically calculating spectator’, was intent on stymieing the unification of Germany, noted one correspondent in February 1862: ‘Who in the world would believe in the reality of German unity, as long as these conditions persist …?’¹⁹² ‘Prussia is the big question mark in Germany, and the so-called German question is merely an imprecise term for the Prussian question,’ continued the article, because unification could not occur against the wishes of Berlin, but the Prussian government showed no sign of desiring to cooperate with the other German states.¹⁹³ Moreover, ‘no other party in Prussia offers the remotest hope that this power [Prussia] will ever depart from the status quo of the Bund to join a reform of the Confederation which would suit Austria and the Mittelstaaten’.¹⁹⁴

A ‘political wilderness’ had been created in Prussia, which made a conflict between Berlin, Vienna and the other German states seem likely, to the benefit of France, lamented the mouthpiece of South German political Catholicism.¹⁹⁵ After 1862, however, the Historisch-politische Blätter gave a more positive appraisal of Prussia, as it became frustrated with the Mittelstaaten, the Confederation and Austria. ‘Greater Germans’ had failed to address the questions of territorial and cultural integrity and political sovereignty posed by unification, preferring to blame Berlin in order to obscure the responsibility of the third Germany.¹⁹⁶ Even in 1859, it now seemed to the Catholic periodical, the sins of the middling states had exceeded those of the Hohenzollern monarchy.¹⁹⁷ Loyal to Germany before Catholicism, the publication preferred to back the German state of Prussia rather than to risk a resurrected Confederation of the Rhine, in which the weak, particularist states of the third Germany would be dominated by the Bonapartist regime of France.¹⁹⁸ When there was ‘no other choice’, ran an article in 1863, it was better to be ‘Prussian-imperial’ than ‘Rhine-confederal’:

Many guileless souls will say that this is self-evident, but they are decidedly wrong. Thus, it is the most pressing duty of all of us, for whom the well-being of Germany and of the church – but otherwise nothing – is close to our hearts, not to allow ourselves to be drawn towards blind embitterment against the second German power, and not to talk ourselves unawares into a hateful mood, in the course of which even the renewal of a French protectorate over our states must appear in a milder light, as a desirable alliance against the hated policy of Berlin.¹⁹⁹

Consequently, the Historisch-politische Blätter warned against the misuse of the Bund and the misdirection of public opinion towards an antagonism with the Prussian state.²⁰⁰ Such warnings came at the height of the constitutional crisis and before Prussia’s victory over Denmark at the battle of Düppel on 18 April 1864.

There were many reasons why Bismarck’s appointment as Minister-President of Prussia failed to deter contemporaries from seeing the kingdom as the pivot of a liberal and constitutional, if not peaceable, unification of Germany. The 47-year-old Junker, who had lived abroad as Prussia’s envoy in Frankfurt and St Petersburg for most of the preceding decade, was an unknown quantity outside conservative circles, having briefly enjoyed a national reputation as a young firebrand – in his early thirties – and as an ultra in 1848–49. During his opening public performance as Minister-President, before the budget committee on 30 September 1862, some witnesses found him nervous and abrupt, his hands shaking and his speech oscillating between bluster and indiscretion.²⁰¹ Others believed him to be the last of the reactionaries, betraying the desperation of the monarch and his advisers. ‘With the employment of this man, the last and most powerful bolt of the “by-the-grace-of-God” reaction has been shot,’ wrote Rochau: ‘Even if there is much that he has learned and unlearned, he is in no way a fully fledged statesman but merely an adventurer of the commonest sort, concerned only with what the next day may bring.’²⁰² On several occasions, Bismarck himself complained that he had been unable to recruit talented or established ministers. As a result, few outside government predicted that the ministry would last long. To Freytag and to Sybel, it seemed necessary for liberals to take a pause, in the opinion of the former, ‘not of indolence and exhaustion, but for gathering strength’, in the expectation that they would reassume office.²⁰³ According to the latter, liberals should raise their ‘voice, unsparingly and fearlessly, against the false advice of the counsellors of the throne’ in order to save the King for the land and the land for the King.²⁰⁴ As early as February 1863, the diarist Theodor von Bernhardi reported that ‘all think that Bismarck’s government is finished and they are convinced that he cannot hold on any longer’.²⁰⁵ If the elections of October 1863 failed to produce a Chamber of Deputies ‘which concurs with the current ministry, then it is the constitutional duty of the current ministers to make way for men with whom the new Abgeordnetenhaus can agree’, wrote the economist and deputy John Prince-Smith.²⁰⁶ In a similar vein, remarked the editor of the Preussische Jahrbücher Rudolf Haym, it was common for liberals to argue that ‘the storm’ would soon ‘blow over’.²⁰⁷ Within government, Bismarck, too, at times appeared to anticipate an early end to constitutional deadlock, albeit on different grounds, with the ministry emerging victorious after deputies had tired of the affair and the public had become bored.²⁰⁸ From either point of view, it appeared that the constitutional crisis would soon be over.

Bismarck’s opportunism and unorthodoxy, although they also suited his temperament and outlook, were the corollary of his weak position. In conservative ranks, he had been labelled a ‘democrat’ by counter-revolutionaries such as the chief of the military cabinet Edwin von Manteuffel, who favoured a coup d’état. In addition, like all ministers, he was dependent on the monarch, who appointed the executive, making it imperative that he demonstrated as emphatically as possible that he was the servant of the King not parliament. ‘In the palace the King heard from every side insinuations to the effect that I was a democrat in disguise,’ he wrote later: ‘I could gain his complete trust only by showing him that I was not afraid of the chamber.’²⁰⁹ To this end, Bismarck deliberately exaggerated his willingness to contravene the constitution, playing the part of a ‘Junker reactionary’ in order to head off criticism from the right.²¹⁰ At court, this tactic seems to have been quite well understood, with Wilhelm himself pointing out to the Crown Prince that ‘Minister v. Bismarck’s utterance that we could reach the point of dispensing with the constitution’ was merely ‘one of the eventualities which lie within the range of possibility’.²¹¹ It was not the sole ‘goal of his efforts’.²¹²

In fact, as contemporary commentators were aware, Bismarck was a ‘chameleon to whom every party lays a claim’, switching from one position to another in order to garner support and head off attacks, in the words of the liberal chief of the Prussian literary bureau Max Duncker.²¹³ What was characteristic of the Minister-President at the beginning of his period of office was his malleability and unpredictability, as Kurd von Schlözer, a friend from the embassy in St Petersburg, recorded after a rendezvous on 3 October 1862:

We drank a lot of champagne, which loosened even more his naturally loose tongue. In the Herrenhaus he paints the reaction he plans in colours so black that, as he puts it, the lords themselves are becoming anxious about the conditions he says he will bring about if need be. Before the gentlemen of the second chamber he appears at one moment very unbending, but in the next hints at his desire to mediate. Finally, he intends to make the German cabinets believe that the King is hard put to restrain the Cavourism of his new minister. There is no denying that until now people are impressed by his spirit and his brilliance.²¹⁴

There is little evidence that, outside government, contemporaries were as impressed as Schlözer intimated. Rather, they seem to have been bemused by and sceptical of Bismarck, knowing that it was in the minister’s interest to portray the struggle as one between the monarchical principle and a parliamentary regime. As such, the Minister-President’s strategy was already well established, resting on a distinction elaborated and popularised by Friedrich Julius Stahl and taken up by the reaction as a means of discrediting the opposition. Thus, when Twesten had threatened in January 1863 that the lower chamber would not support the government if it went to war against Denmark, there was an element of ritual in Bismarck’s retort in the Abgeordnetenhaus, over the loud protests of the assembled deputies, ‘that, if we find it necessary to carry on a war, we shall do so with or without your consent’.²¹⁵ The prerogatives of the monarch and the executive, particularly in the sphere of the military and foreign policy, would not be subjected to a parliamentary diktat, he implied.

Likewise, liberals and democrats, despite labelling the regime ‘an already-extant administrative absolutism’, in the phrase of the constitutional lawyer and deputy Rudolf Gneist, continued to distinguish, according to the precedent set in the revolution, between a constitutional regime and a parliamentary one, where a popular assembly dominated, and effectively nominated, the executive.²¹⁸ ‘“No parliamentary regime” was always the battle-cry of the reaction, and the old liberals often concurred, without perceiving the scope of the magic word,’ Lasker had written in the Deutsche Jahrbücher für Politik und Literatur in 1862:

Monarchical or parliamentary: this was the question of judgement which ministries laid before the voting Volk in order to gain a safeguard from a loyal chamber, which might have wanted to exercise a certain control over the actions of the government. And yet the constitution knows nothing of this opposition, and the fundamental concept of constitutional government is an intimate merger of monarchical and parliamentary power. For the government in a constitutional state is nothing other than the extension of the state order, which rests on the harmony of king and Volk.²¹⁹

Democrats in Prussia, proclaimed Wilhelm Löwe in 1863, had ‘carefully avoided purely theoretical questions’, in particular ‘the question of parliamentarism or a personal regime of the king’, since it was not relevant in the circumstances of the early 1860s.²²⁰ ‘Acknowledgement of the principle of constitutionalism and democracy’ now existed, declared the radical publication Der Beobachter in April 1866, and it could not be ‘wiped from history’.²²¹ The problem in the early 1860s, as Lasker recognised, was not whether a constitutional monarchy should exist, but whether monarchical and parliamentary competencies and powers could be reconciled when the assembly and the government failed to agree: ‘The inescapable precondition of every constitutional government is the capacity to create agreement between king and parliament.’²²² The most obvious area of contention or gap, which the constitution of 1850 failed to address, concerned the army. In this sense, the constitutional crisis in Prussia was a genuine one – and not simply a subterfuge for a return to absolutism – which had implications for the constitution of a German nation-state.

Reform of the army was controversial but not clear-cut. Like the Reichsverfassung of 1849, which stated that ‘the Kaiser disposes over the army’, the Prussian constitution of 1850 was unequivocal in its maintenance of monarchical authority in the military sphere, but it also vested in the Abgeordnetenhaus the power to block budget increases. One unresolved constitutional question was the extent to which budgetary scrutiny permitted a substantive parliamentary discussion of military affairs; another asked what should be done when the different organs of state failed to agree a budget – who should rule and with what financial means? Bismarck’s answer, presented in the debate about the House of Deputies’ address on 27 January 1863 condemning the government’s breach of the constitution, was that the King, as head of state and guarantor of the executive, had to ensure order and the continuity of government in the event that the three legislative authorities – the administration, the Herrenhaus and the Abgeordnetenhaus – could not agree a budget in a constitutional manner, for ‘none of those authorities can coerce the others into submission’.²²³ His charge was a legal one: ‘This address demands from the royal house of Hohenzollern its constitutional rights of government in order to transfer them to the majority in this House.’²²⁴ ‘When no budget comes into being, then we have a tabula rasa’, the Minister-President had proclaimed to the budget commission on 30 September 1862: ‘the constitution offers no way out, for, here, one interpretation stands against another.’²²⁵ Bismarck was, in the words of an article by Ludwig von Gerlach in the Kreuzzeitung in May 1862, ruling ‘without the law’, but not ‘against’ it.²²⁶ In May 1863, after another parliamentary address had refused cooperation in reforming the army, the King replied in similar terms to those of his Minister-President, accusing politicians of trying ‘to prepare the ground for an unconstitutional dictatorship of the House of Deputies’.²²⁷ Although both Wilhelm and Bismarck had, at various points, threatened to exceed the constitution, which had united liberals and democrats against them, they continued to make a parallel constitutional case. Financially, the Minister-President had told the parliamentary commission on 30 September 1862, the constitution of 1850 did not specify that budgets should be passed in advance, but merely estimated in advance, allowing the government to rule without their enactment. Such constitutional ambiguity combined with differences of opinion about the role of the army in Prussia and in a future German nation-state to set limits on resistance to Bismarck’s government, even though it had become ‘unpopular to a degree scarcely seen before in Prussia’, according to the Minister-President’s banker Gerson Bleichröder.²²⁸

While it is true that there was broad support for the civilian and bourgeois Landwehr and the German volunteers of 1813, whose national successes – as ‘men of action, of daring’, in favour of a ‘war of life and death’ and opposed to ‘narrow-minded dynastic egotism’ – were celebrated in 1863, there was also widespread scepticism of the Bund, whose military constitution had undergone only minor reform despite glaring inadequacies, and there was reluctant support for Prussia as the most likely basis of a German army.²²⁹ As a result, a large majority of commentators concurred, it was important that the Hohenzollern state further improved its military. ‘The new organisation is a good thing for the country, as King Wilhelm ceaselessly assures us’, wrote the Historisch-politische Blätter in 1863, concurring ‘that the previous disorder of the Landwehr was in need of reform, since there was, given an unusually expanded population, general conscription in name only, and a heavy burden fell on those affected’.²³⁰ ‘Democracy now rules in Prussia, but only via the military question; without this heavy imposition on the pecuniary resources of the Volk, we would never have seen all the votes of the chamber save three dozen go to the united Progressive Party,’ an article in the same publication had noted a year earlier: ‘This chamber pushes the government to the most extreme degree; it is demanding the impossible, for it is, on a hundred grounds, unthinkable that the army reform will now be reversed again.’²³¹ Liberals and even some democrats converged in their backing of an expansion of the Prussian army on national grounds. ‘We, too, desire a restructuring of the army organisation, but in the spirit of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau’, declared the radical Johann Jacoby to voters in November 1863, before going on to champion the Landwehr, which alone corresponded ‘to the basic conditions of a constitutional state order’.²³² To Schulze-Delitzsch, one of the main democratic critics of Bismarck, Germany needed ‘Prussia as the most militarily capable state, deploying the whole strength of its Volk to take the lead in these struggles’ against its many enemies, ‘France in the West, Russia in the East, perhaps Italy in the South, Denmark and Sweden with England in the North’.²³³ All German tribes were ‘belligerent’, but Prussia had seen such belligerence develop ‘advantageously’ over the course ‘of a long history’.²³⁴ Despite the vociferousness of the struggle against Bismarck’s ministry, Prussia was vital for Germany’s ‘national existence’.²³⁵

For many opponents of Bismarck, the Prussian constitutional crisis of the 1860s did not rule out the Hohenzollern monarchy as a fulcrum of unification. ‘From a certain side’ – that of the Grossdeutschen – ‘it has been seen to be desirable to draw a comparison between the governments of Austria and Prussia,’ wrote Schulze in October 1863: ‘I am glad to take up this comparison, and you know that I take a very impartial position in this respect precisely because we stand in opposition to our government and because we have never given them any quarter in the treatment of this question, and shall not give them any in future.’²³⁶ Nevertheless, even though Bismarck was reprehensible, the fact that there was a crisis in Prussia showed that the state was fundamentally different from Austria, where absolutism was accepted by the political public:

Look at the powerful revolt of the Volksgeist and of legal awareness in Prussia against the current Prussian [press] edict, and this edict temporarily introduces conditions – but truly not for the duration – which are completely in order in Austria. Thank God we are making a fuss, and I accept, at best, that other Germans will see it as a turning-point and will press for improvement. But why, I ask myself, are such demands also not made of Austria for the removal of similarly poor conditions? Because it is known throughout Germany that nothing would be achieved by it. At least we in Prussia should take such a challenge to heart and, it is believed in Germany, we have the means to effect improvements.²³⁷

The press edict of June 1863, which Bismarck had introduced to such outcry after the dissolution of the lower chamber, was immediately repealed by the Abgeordnetenhaus, using its constitutional powers, after the return of a large liberal majority in autumn of the same year. In a similar way, the Minister-President’s pursuit of judges and civil servants had proved ineffective. Although, according to the estimate of one liberal deputy, up to a thousand functionaries could have been affected by government harassment, the ministry’s actions had little, if any, impact on the polls, in spite of Bismarck’s warning that officials revealing their ‘oppositional views’ would be treated as ‘opponents of the government’; what was more, the involvement of twenty deputies, including nine judges, appears to have consolidated liberal opposition in the lower chamber rather than cowing deputies into submission.²³⁸ In their darker moments, some liberals and democrats toyed with the eventuality that Bismarck’s government would use force against its own population. Sybel, for example, warned Baumgarten in May 1863 that he doubted that ‘a coup de main such as 1848 would be possible here today’, ‘where a disciplined army of 200,000 men holds together as a result of training and discipline’.²³⁹ Yet few contemporaries appear to have envisaged a reversion to absolutism or even reaction in Prussia.

Sybel’s purpose in discussing force was to head off Baumgarten’s call for Prussian deputies to make ‘the whole land rise up’.²⁴⁰ When Max Duncker raised the spectre of a coup d’état in January 1864, in the same rhetorical spirit as Sybel, Bernhardi dismissed the suggestion: ‘I don’t believe in a Staatsstreich or an imposed electoral law in our case’.²⁴¹ Unruh, the only leader of the Nationalverein who knew Bismarck personally, had been anxious from the beginning to dispel the idea that the Minister-President was merely a member of the camarilla, unable to compromise with liberals and unwilling to work with the institutions of representative government: ‘I said to my old Prussian and new German friends, they were in error if they saw Bismarck simply as a reactionary or even as an instrument of reaction. Certainly, he doesn’t belong to the liberals, but he has ideas and plans in mind which are quite different from those of Manteuffel and his colleagues.’²⁴² Bismarck was ‘a very original and skilled character of great energy’, whose intentions were unclear but who was capable of cooperating with the forces of liberalism, Unruh explained to the members of the Nationalverein at Coburg in October 1862.²⁴³ It was a mistake, wrote the Berlin liberal to Bennigsen in October 1865, ‘to lump the state of Prussia and its population together with its government’, for ‘Prussia is the good half of Germany, it has significance and history as a state’, deserving support in spite of its ‘sad internal conditions’, against which Prussian liberals continued to fight.²⁴⁴

In the South, conceded Viktor Böhmert to Bennigsen on 29 October 1864, it had proved more difficult ‘to come to terms with Prussian leadership’ than in the North, where there was ‘no choice’, since ‘I prefer the unity of Germany over a couple of Prussian constitutional paragraphs, which – in the end – can only be resolved by a German parliament’, and since ‘doubt about Prussian leadership constitutes a return to political nothingness for us’.²⁴⁵ Yet at least some southerners, including liberal opponents of Prussia such as Robert von Mohl, were also prepared to dismiss the long-term consequences of the constitutional crisis. ‘It would have been childish to declare oneself against Prussia because its government was, momentarily, a violent one, inimical to freedom, and sought to achieve greater unity not through moral but through physical conquests’, wrote the Heidelberg constitutional lawyer, deputy and Badenese envoy in his memoirs.²⁴⁶ What had stopped Mohl from backing Prussia was a belief in the cultural and political benefits of ‘fragmentation into so many states’.²⁴⁷ Nevertheless, he admitted that ‘the feeling of weakness and negligibility in all European questions, on the one hand, and the wretchedness, the unnecessary expenses, the narrow points of view of Kleinstaaterei, as well as the constantly repeated difficulty of bringing general institutions into being, on the other, had gradually made the desire for unity the dominant goal, and almost a passion, of a great part of the nation’.²⁴⁸

Even for many proponents of Kleindeutschland, opposition to Prussia on constitutional grounds was not considered ‘childish’. Yet such opposition tended to promote quiescence on the national question rather than support for Austria, the Bund or the Mittelstaaten. Bennigsen refused to join the ranks of ‘lazy pessimists’, who thought ‘revolution impossible, a national initiative of the Prussian government without prospects’ and ‘energetically concentrated Prussian particularism’ the only option, but he nonetheless lamented the fact that ‘the Bismarckian tendency, that is the worship of military power and diplomatic successes’ had gained, ‘in a shocking way, the upper hand’.²⁴⁹ In the heated committee meeting of the Nationalverein on 28 October 1865, which finally agreed to the readoption of the programme of 1860 and an interim transfer of the central authority to Prussia during unification, Bennigsen maintained that,

in the period of struggle which lies before us, we should not allow ourselves to be deflected by a justified feeling of embitterment about the regime in Berlin and by passionate irritation from the course that the national party has recognised as the right one for the political development of Germany; still less, though, should we allow ourselves to be bribed and seduced by those voices which seek salvation in an increase in power for the greatest purely German state at the cost of the highest ideal goods of the nation. No Volk can work towards the growth of external power alongside the suspension of legal sensibility, a feeling of freedom and moral goods without the great danger of destroying their innermost core.²⁵⁰

The only alternative was to trust in ‘a great people’, which would ‘sacrifice itself’ even ‘in terrible times’.²⁵¹

As war with Austria approached, the majority of the committee of the Nationalverein rejected, on 13–14 May, Bismarck’s offer of a directly elected constituent assembly – a German parliament – to reform the Confederation in April 1866. ‘Should the German Volk support a parliament and a reform of the Bund, it must be put forward in the precise form which the history of the years 1848 and 1849 has given it, and, above all, the government which wants to refashion the whole constitution of the nation must have given completely different proofs of its constitutional disposition and loyalty to the constitution than has hitherto been the case on the side of the Prussian government,’ ran the Nationalverein’s statement, framed by Rochau, on 14 May: ‘As long as the Prussian constitution is a dead letter, our nation will never believe in a German constitution placed in view by Prussia, not to mention be set in fundamental motion by such a view.’²⁵² At the same committee meeting, a majority of Prussians refused to support Bismarck if a Austro-Prussian war were to break out; they were backed – it was said – by most of the population in the South, though not in North and Central Germany. Oetker, one of a minority of Bismarck’s admirers in the National Association leadership, recalled the tone of the meeting:

‘The man is not at all worthy of taking the German question in hand,’ cried Schulze-Delitzsch and others repeatedly: ‘Not a Pfennig should be approved for him!’ I, however, wrote in the Morgenzeitung: ‘If Prussia puts itself, by means of a decisive and prospectively successful action, at the head of the nation in order to a free Bundesstaat into being, then on the national side no aid would be too large, no sacrifice too heavy.’²⁵³

Against the wishes of the committee, Bennigsen went to meet Bismarck, having already asked Roggenbach to inform him of ‘Bismarck’s plans, his resources, his position vis-à-vis the King and his intention of binding himself to others, in addition to the conservatives’.²⁵⁴ Like many other leaders of national organisations, Bennigsen was undecided about which line to take in 1866, remaining neither for nor against the Prussian Minister-President: ‘Even so clear and calm a figure as R. von Bennigsen had not yet freed himself of the general antipathy towards Bismarck,’ recorded Oetker in May 1866: ‘He agreed with me that the perpetual empty negation of the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus was reproachable and damaging; but he had not yet come to acknowledge Bismarck fully.’²⁵⁵

One of the best-known evaluations of liberals’ attitude to the Prussian ministry was produced by the academic and journalist Hermann Baumgarten. His ‘Self-Critique’ of German liberalism, which he completed in October 1866, is usually seen as a description of liberalism’s real weaknesses and tactical mistakes rather than a polemic, published in the Preussische Jahrbücher, by a moderate liberal, dissatisfied by the ‘doctrinairism’ of the Prussian Progressive Party. The essence of Baumgarten’s case was that the Fortschrittspartei, initially backed by the majority of public opinion, had failed to take the opportunity to govern effectively between 1858 and 1862 or to collaborate with Bismarck after 1862. ‘A politically experienced man, who looked at the position of the Prussian state impartially, would have to say that the favourableness of the circumstances’ between 1858 and 1862 ‘was not fully exploited, that liberal ministers could have given their edifice firmer foundations, that they could have better used and more carefully consolidated their relationship with the throne’, contended Baumgarten in ‘Der deutsche Liberalismus’.²⁵⁶ The constitutional crisis had been a ‘turning-point’ for German liberalism, creating ‘new aims’, ‘new methods’ and a new ‘outcome’.²⁵⁷ Thus, although Bismarck, on entering office, had ‘suggested a compromise to liberal leaders, which would have meant a liberal turn for the government at important points, above all in the army question’, they had thrown it back at him ‘quite demeaningly’, seeing him ‘as the worst incarnation of the most objectionable Junkerdom’ and ignoring ‘his diplomatic achievements’ and ‘the meaning of his entire personality’.²⁵⁸

Instead of exploring the possibility of working with the Minister-President, liberals were bent on pushing him to contravene the constitution in order to create a backlash against him and secure his resignation or dismissal. Having subsequently discovered that they could not remove Bismarck, the Fortschrittspartei should then have reached a compromise: ‘Not disposing of the means to distance Herr v. Bismarck, they should have gone along with his initiatives.’²⁵⁹ Later, they were forced to reach agreement with the ministry on worse terms, leading to public disillusionment. ‘In the first great political struggle undertaken on German soil without the help of revolution’, the Progressive Party, when it pushed to extremes, found that ‘the advantage of power was unconditionally on the side of their opponent’.²⁶⁰ By 1865, ‘Prussia and Germany had had a series of the most significant experiences, which countered the original conditions of the Fortschrittspartei in general and in particular with devastating force.’²⁶¹ Even though the Progressives had been joined by liberals in the Mittelstaaten, who had opposed Prussia’s Great Power policy in Schleswig-Holstein, they remained ‘impotent’ in their rejection of ‘the hated Bismarckian regime’.²⁶² According to Baumgarten, ‘everyone who counted as a political force in Germany stood in phalanxes against Bismarckian policy’, but Bismarck’s ministry nevertheless ‘strode towards its goal calmly and surely, barely hindered by its countless opponents’.²⁶³ From a reading of the Karlsruhe historian’s account, it appeared that nearly all liberals had stood in opposition to the Prussian Minister-President in a dogmatic, pointless and unsuccessful struggle.

In fact, many liberals had been willing to accept aspects of Bismarck’s rule and few were ready to act against his ministry. Baumgarten himself was a protagonist in a dispute which divided some liberals before 1866 and unsettled many others. In particular, after victory in the war against Denmark in 1864, ‘a man of rare strength and cleverness’ stood before the nation, showing it ‘the right way’.²⁶⁴ ‘A lucky star lit up Prussian power, but an unfavourable wind was blowing against Prussian freedom: was there a point in merely chasing after the latter and sacrificing the former?’, asked the liberal publicist rhetorically:

How long had one sighed in liberal circles for a man who would finally lead Prussia forward! … And, in fact, there were a hundred reasons to give Prussian policy a turn from that intended years beforehand. Nothing stood in the way of a really healthy, free development apart from the incompleteness of its own growth. Complete freedom rests only on complete power. A state which always has to work at the outer limit of its strength in order to secure its existence remains in the shackles of its need. In addition, there was the fact that, in Prussia, certain absolutist, aristocratic and bureaucratic traditions dominated the inherited state body, which it was best to push back if one wanted to place the whole state on a new basis. In the rest of Germany, which had to be won over, these traditions could not become powerful … Things were still not yet so. A resolution of the internal conflict was still of considerable importance to the fortunate minister. He didn’t hide the fact that he was ready to make not inconsiderable sacrifices for such a resolution.²⁶⁵

Baumgarten’s call for cooperation with Bismarck was all the more remarkable because of his earlier stance. Born in Braunschweig in 1825, he had, as a student, been an active member of a Burschenschaft in Jena, before being drawn by Young Hegelianism to Halle. Later, he became a follower of Gervinus, whom he joined in Heidelberg as an historian during the 1850s. In the middle of the decade, he defended his master against charges of treason for the publication of Einleitung in die Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1853), which predicted that democracy would be the state form of the future. Despite his caution in some respects and his desire to demonstrate his pragmatism in ‘Selbstkritik’, Baumgarten had advised greater agitation and resistance to Bismarck as late as 1863.²⁶⁶ Baumgarten to Sybel, 22 May 1863, in Fenske (ed.), Reichsgründung, 273–5. Though a Borussian historian and a supporter of Kleindeutschland who wrote for the Preussische Jahrbücher and edited the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which was opposed to the Allgemeine-Zeitung, he was nonetheless sympathetic to southern points of view, having transferred to Karlsruhe in 1861, where conditions were better than in the North, with the Grand Duke’s ‘heart-felt’ backing of German liberalism, a strong and talented liberal government, the ‘almost unanimous enthusiasm of the public’, the absence of a potentially resistant aristocracy, a workable bureaucracy and favourable external conditions.²⁶⁷ The fact that Baumgarten’s earlier hopes of German liberalism were subsequently disappointed betrays the divisions within the party, especially by 1866, when ‘Selbstkritik’ was written. All the same, the Heidelberg historian’s own support for the opponents of Wilhelm I and Bismarck in the constitutional crisis also showed the liberals’ strength until 1866.²⁶⁸ Even in ‘Selbstkritik’, he admitted – as a ‘duty of fairness’ – that the tactical opposition of the Progressive Party to the Prussian government ‘corresponded to the dominant views and opinions in Prussia and Germany at that time’, which would have made cooperation with Bismarck seem like an ‘unworthy weakness’.²⁶⁹ This helped to explain the circumstance, left without comment by Baumgarten, that the Prussian Minister-President had, until a late date, been prepared ‘to make not inconsiderable sacrifices’ for a resolution of the constitutional crisis.

Bismarck, of course, was never likely to overstate his debt to party and public opinion. In the spring of 1863, he had written to an American university friend that ‘I hate politics … At this moment, my ears are full of it. I’m compelled to listen to unusually silly speeches from the mouths of unusually childish and excited politicians … querelle d’allemand … the babblers cannot rule Prussia … They have too little wit and too much self-satisfaction, are stupid and impudent.’²⁷⁰ Such private ranting, however, was indicative of the Minister-President’s frustration, betraying the plausibility of a return – as in 1858 – to a liberal government. Bismarck had to pay attention to parties and the press, and at times to court them, because of the weakness of his position, which was exacerbated by his stand-off with the Abgeordnetenhaus. His wife Johanna, fearing for the health of her husband as a result of 15-hour stints of work and unrelenting headaches, wrote in January 1863 that he started his day by skimming through the newspapers and then divided his time between correspondence, the King, the ministerial council and ‘the monstrous Chamber’.²⁷¹

While it is true that the Minister-President was always willing to exploit the liberals’ weaknesses, most notably their justified fear of ‘reaction’ and their anxiety about the collapse of their vote, he was unsuccessful in this endeavour, with his repressive acts and threats merely serving to consolidate a single liberal and democratic opposition which survived a victorious war in Schleswig-Holstein, the offer of a National Assembly and the spectre of a war against Austria more or less intact.²⁸⁰ Progressives and other liberals rejected the government’s reform of the army and criticised its contravention of the constitution, but they continued to cooperate in the formulation of policy in other respects, for example by supporting the ministry’s exclusion of Austria from the Zollverein in 1865. Such cooperation and moderation, together with widespread suspicion of the Minister-President’s motives and inconsistency, had militated against the realisation of Bismarck’s prophesy in June 1862 that ‘the longer the affair is drawn out the more the chamber will sink in public esteem’, forcing it to come to a settlement.²⁸¹ Given the reality of continuing liberal strength, the Minister-President had little option but to contemplate compromise. Despite his pathos-laden discussions with Wilhelm of Polignac, Strafford, Louis XVI and the prospect of a heroic death on a revolutionary scaffold at the start of his ministry, Bismarck found it impossible to cast the liberals as revolutionaries and he was unwilling to launch a coup d’état himself.²⁸²

On constitutional and national grounds, the Minister-President had long anticipated that agreement might be feasible, as he had explained to a close friend in September 1861:

In any event, I don’t see why we shy away so whimperingly from the idea of a Volksvertretung, either in the Bund or in a Zollvereinsparlament. We can’t fight an institution which plays a legitimate part in each German state and which we conservatives, even in Prussia, cannot do without! In the national sphere, very moderate concessions have to date still been recognised as worthwhile. One could create a genuinely conservative National Assembly and still be thanked for it, even by liberals.²⁸³

Bismarck, of course, remained an advocate of the ‘monarchical principle’ in the tradition of Stahl, according to which it was pitted against ‘parliamentary government’. Yet, in common with many conservatives after 1848, he had renounced a return to a noble-dominated society of estates and monarchical rule without representative institutions. He recognised ‘the principle of the struggle against the revolution’ as his own, he had assured Ludwig von Gerlach in 1857, but he intended to act within the new post-revolutionary parameters of politics, including working with the principal parties of the Landtag, to the extent that the government supposedly had little room to manoeuvre:

The course that a Prussian ministry can take is not so very wide; whoever stands on the far left will have to move to the right when he becomes a minister; and whoever stands far to the right will have to move to the left when he becomes a minister, and there is no room for the far-ranging digressions of doctrine, which can be developed by speakers and deputies, on this narrow path on which the government of a great land can stroll.²⁸⁴

Gerlach himself had converted to the idea of political parties during the revolution and he continued to abide by the constitution in the crisis of the 1860s, arguing in an essay on ‘Prussia’s Struggle against Democracy’ in January 1863 that ‘the government, by continuing to rule in accordance with the constitutional declaration, stands on … the rights of the king entrenched in the constitutional declaration. The usurpations are on the side of democracy, which is interfering with the constitutional declaration against the Herrenhaus and the Crown.’²⁸⁵ Bismarck was not an advocate of ‘constitutional monarchy’ or ‘parliamentarism’, as defined by his adviser Lothar Bucher in 1855, but he was ready to abide by the constitution and to cooperate with representative institutions.²⁸⁶ In 1858, he had merely suggested ‘more energetic activity on the part of the land’s assembly’.²⁸⁷ By 1861, he was proposing ‘a German Gesammtvertretung’ to deal with the military, tariffs and trade, with delegates chosen from individual state assemblies, not directly elected, in order to safeguard ‘the intelligence and conservative stance’ of the chamber.²⁸⁸ Such an offer, ‘as a first step towards better institutions’, Bismarck wrote in the same memorandum, would make ‘a profound impression in Germany and, in particular, it would ease considerably the task of the Prussian government at home in respect of the elections and chambers’.²⁸⁹ Finally, by the time of the Frankfurt Fürstentag in 1863, the Minister-President was willing to concede a directly elected German parliament – a gesture that he repeated early in 1866. Universal suffrage was less dangerous in the Hohenzollern state than in Britain, he contended in 1866, because ‘in England only the higher classes are dependent on the monarchy and constitution, which extend their privileges and their domination over the land. The masses are raw, uneducated, and their loyalty to the Crown is not akin to that in Prussia.’²⁹⁰ Whereas in Britain ‘the very idea of universal suffrage is terrifying’, in Prussia and Germany it was an acceptable risk, proposed Bismarck in 1866. Likewise, he refused to compare its effects in France, which was ‘without a monarchical tradition’, in the phrase of a marginal comment in 1866, with its likely consequences in the German lands.²⁹¹ However cynical his motives, the Prussian Minister-President had few qualms about implementing these plans for a German parliament, electorate and constitution.

Bismarck’s constitutional concessions were designed, above all, to strengthen Prussia’s position in Germany. He remained, first and foremost, a diplomat, pursuing ‘the Great Power position of Prussia which had been fought for with the heavy sacrifices of the Volk’s goods and blood’, as he put it to the Abgeordnetenhaus in January 1864.²⁹² Serving as the Prussian envoy to the Bundestag in the 1850s, Bismarck had become sceptical of the historical traditions and legal legitimacy of a weak Confederation and of particularist German states, leading him to espouse a doctrine of state interests and state power which made him seem ‘not completely reliable’, in Ludwig von Gerlach’s estimation in 1854.²⁹³ To his former opponent in Frankfurt and ally in Vienna, the Austrian first minister Rechberg, the Prussian Minister-President was ‘a man who admits his political cynicism so openly,’ that he dismissed any maintenance of the Confederation and defence of the ‘well-established rights of the German princes’ with the ‘hair-raising’ comment that Berlin and Vienna should pursue their own interests on the basis of cabinet policy, not nationalism.²⁹⁴ In conservative circles, even in the Prussian Foreign Office, such cynical and naked pursuit of Prussian interests meant that ‘they don’t like him there … [since] he makes his own policy’, in the words of Bismarck’s friend in St Petersburg Schlözer in 1860.²⁹⁵ A similar image of the Minister-President was also adopted in liberal and democratic ranks, as Bismarck openly derided their self-interested and unrealistic nationalism, declaring to the lower chamber in January 1864:

There must be a peculiar magic in this word ‘German’. It can be seen that everyone seeks to win the word for himself and each calls what is useful to him, what gives his party standpoint an advantage, ‘German’, to be altered according to need. Thus, it has come about that it has, at times, been called ‘German’ to rise up against the Bund and, at other times, it is held to be ‘German’ to take the side of the Bund, which has suddenly become progressive. Thus, it can easily happen that we are reproached, that we want to know nothing of Germany apart from our private interests. I can return this reproach to you with complete justification. You want to know nothing of Prussia because it suits your party standpoint either not to let Prussia stand or to let it exist as a domain of the Nationalverein … You put your party standpoint above the interests of the country; you say, ‘Prussia can exist as we want it to or, if not, it can fall.’ … This shows how far you stand from the actual Volk, how you have become ensconced in coteries of like-minded people, and how you have allowed yourselves to be deceived about the real state of affairs by a press which is dependent on you.²⁹⁶

Bismarck’s purpose in such speeches was to defend his policies – on the army, Schleswig-Holstein, the navy, and the Confederation – against liberal criticisms. It is worth noting that, even on these occasions, he took the national idea seriously and confronted the notion that Germany and the Bund took precedence over Prussia. Unification would require Prussia because of ‘evil conditions’, ‘which derive from the unnatural multitude of borders in the interior of Germany and which are reinforced by the height, unknown in earlier times, to which the consciousness of sovereignty of the individual states has risen’, recorded Bismarck in 1861.²⁹⁷ Prussia alone, it seemed, could overcome particularism and fend off the Great Powers, including Austria. In this sense, he wrote in a memorandum for Wilhelm on 30 March 1858, ‘there is nothing more German than the development of Prussia’s particularist interests, correctly understood’.²⁹⁸ Although he refused to subordinate the interests of the Hohenzollern monarchy to those of ‘Germany’, Bismarck had accepted the reality and utility of a national idea which had been largely formulated by liberals. In part, this was the response of a young Junker, involved in the organisation of a new ‘conservative party’, to the national preoccupations of liberal and democratic revolutionaries in 1848–49. During the revolution itself, Bismarck had already identified Prussia as the ‘best bulwark of German power’.²⁹⁹ In 1851, he had indicated his willingness to conclude ‘separate treaties on tariffs, law, and the military’ outside the Confederation.³⁰⁰ In 1859, he confessed to Schleinitz, ‘in these private reflections’, that his views diverged ‘from those approved on high, and indeed not in the direction of the Kreuzzeitung, but surprisingly towards the Italian side’, since he was not alienated by Italian nationalism and he perceived Prussian and German advantages from cooperating with the ‘national’ powers – Italy and France – against Austria.³⁰¹ By the early 1860s, he was ready to add a German parliament to his list of national offerings, all of which coincided with the aims of many liberals and their rejection of Austria and the Bund. Prussian interests could be seen to have converged with those of liberals in the Klein- and Mittelstaaten: whereas ‘the humiliating feeling of lack of worth and security abroad’ and ‘the limitedness of political circles’ was ‘dominant’ in the smaller states, ‘the Prussian Volk’ felt let down by Austria and hemmed in by the Confederation, prevented from realising its potential. For its part, the German Volk was condemned, as ‘a great and powerful nation’, ‘by the shortcomings of its constitution for the whole (Gesammtverfassung) not only to renounce the place in Europe that it deserves, but also to live in constant fear of attack by its neighbours’.³⁰²

	Prussia	Austria
Population (millions)	19.3	37.5
Agricultural population (%)	45	70
Grain harvest (millions of tons)	0.8	0.7
Number of steam engines (millions of horsepower)	15,000 (0.8)	3,400 (0.1)
Coal production (millions of tons)	12	5.7
Pig iron production (millions of tons)	0.85	0.46
Railways (km)	3,698	6,895
Gross state income (millions of Thaler)	240	292
State debt (millions of Thaler)	290	1670
Military budget (millions of Thaler)	45	51
Education:
Primary-school pupils (1860)	2,778,000	1,656,000
Secondary-school pupils (1860)	172,900	36,700
University students (1860)	12,400	8,000

Crown Prince:	I didn’t want to express my doubts yesterday in front of the ministers. But what about the future?
King:	Repeated dissolutions, one after the other.
C. P.:	But to what end shall these measures finally lead?
King:	Obedience in the country, scaffold, possibly a rupture of the constitution by barricades in the streets and then naturally suspension of the same.
C. P.:	In Gastein, Bismarck spoke of the untenability of the constitution and of the coming necessity of its abandonment.
King:	The Kaiser of Austria and I are both convinced that in twenty years there will be no more constitutions.
C. P.:	What then?
King:	I don’t know. I won’t be alive then. But this abominable constitutional system can’t continue; it will only bring about the destruction of royal authority and the introduction of a republic with a president as in England. The scoundrels of the opposition, like Schulze-Delitzsch, have to be shown who is King of Prussia.¹⁵³

5 Prussia, the Nation and the Constitution

New Era, Old Politics

**The Zollverein and the Economics of Unification**

Bismarck and the Constitutional Crisis