18

Italy and Germany
1850–1900

Italy renascent

Since the end of the Lombard invasion of 568, Italy had resisted all attempts at reunification. The north was fought over by France, Austria and the powerful cities of Genoa, Milan and Venice. The papacy retained uneasy sovereignty over the centre, and Naples and Sicily changed hands between Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, the Holy Roman Empire and France. The Congress of Vienna had recognized the kingdom of Savoy, Piedmont and Sardinia and given it Genoa, as a buffer against France. One historian of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel, described Italy as nothing more than ‘a historical entity within which events had similar repercussions and effects, and were indeed in a sense imprisoned’.

In 1852 it was little Piedmont that took the initiative. Since Vienna, it had flourished under the liberal monarchies of Charles Albert and his son, Victor Emmanuel. It now acquired the clever and ambitious Count Cavour as its prime minister. An aristocratic champion of Italian unity, he promoted the cause in his personal newspaper, Il Risorgimento, Revival. Piedmont sent 15,000 troops to the Crimean War, thus winning a seat at the Treaty of Paris and a useful alliance with France. Two years after the treaty, in 1858, Cavour visited Napoleon in secret and won a promise of military support in any future war with Austria.

A year later, in 1859, such a war was engineered. France duly joined Piedmont to defeat Austria at the battles of Magenta and Solferino. Devious negotiations followed, under which Austria was able to retain Venice but lost all of northern Italy to Piedmont. Cavour had to cede Savoy to France, but he had gained enough of Italy to establish an embryo Italian state, validated by local plebiscites. Piedmont’s Victor Emmanuel became its king.

Events now moved with speed. In 1860 the charismatic Garibaldi, briefly defender of Rome in 1849, emerged from self-imposed exile to revive his Redshirt irregulars in the cause of Italian unity. He asked for Cavour’s support in marching south to liberate Naples and Sicily from their Bourbon monarchs. Cavour’s ambitions had never extended that far. North Italians still regarded the south as almost part of Africa – much as how some Germans regarded Prussians as part of Asia. But he and Victor Emmanuel could hardly deny Garibaldi their blessing. Britain’s Palmerston offered crucial help from British naval units stationed in Palermo.

The Redshirts landed in Sicily and drove the Bourbons first from the island and then from the kingdom of Naples. The campaign was vividly reported by Ferdinand Eber, a blatant Garibaldi partisan and Times correspondent. It won Garibaldi international celebrity. He dreamed of turning southern Italy into a liberal republic, but in October 1860, at a ‘meeting on the bridge’ at Teano with Victor Emmanuel, he donated his conquest to Italy. Cavour forbade Garibaldi from marching on Rome. The pope was being protected by French troops, Cavour’s trusted and vital allies, but within a year two-thirds of the Papal States had joined the new Italy.

Garibaldi retired in glory to dig his garden on the island of Caprera off Sardinia, emerging later as a mercenary t0 rebellions across Europe, though with little success. Full Italian unity had to await a time when Austria (in 1866) and France (in 1870) were distracted by bloodier struggles elsewhere. But an almost united Italy had at last come into being, and in just two years. It had been fortunate to find in Cavour and Victor Emmanuel leaders of caution and liberalism, and in Garibaldi a soldier to capture the imagination of a continent. Britain even named a Bermondsey biscuit after him. The new Italy also had its own bard, Giuseppe Verdi. His chorus of the Hebrew slaves in Nabucco became the anthem of Italian nationalism.

Otto von Bismarck

For centuries the territories comprising Germany had kept apart France, Austria and Russia like a repelling magnet. Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna had turned repulsion into attraction. Germany now became a problem, a ‘question’. It was a culture and a people but not a nation, let alone a government. Nor did it have defined boundaries. Was it ‘Germany proper’, the old dukedoms and principalities, or was it Greater Germany, possibly embracing Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria? And what of Austria and its shrunken empire? These were all German-speaking peoples, descendants of the tribes of the Rhine, Elbe and upper Danube. But they were leaderless.

One witness to the collapse of Frederick William’s 1848 Frankfurt parliament had no doubt as to the solution. Otto von Bismarck was the Lutheran son of a Junker landlord from Saxony, a brilliant student who rose rapidly in the conservative administration of the Prussian state. He was multilingual, energetic and high-living. He said no man should die without having consumed five thousand bottles of champagne and a hundred thousand cigars. He was never a soldier, though he affected military costume. In an age when the profession of warfare was giving way to that of diplomacy, he combined implacable Prussian nationalism with a pragmatism so amoral as to acquire its own name, realpolitik. He was to tower over the century’s diplomatic personalities, already including Talleyrand, Metternich and Cavour.

By 1851 Bismarck was representing Prussia to the restored German confederation of states. He openly preached Prussian hegemony to young Germans craving the status of nationhood. In a memorandum to his king, he said a Prussia-led Germany should have no truck with the German radicals of 1848. ‘The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power.’ It should base itself on ‘strong, resolute and wise rulers who nourish the military and financial resources of the state’. A true Hegelian, Bismarck held that a citizen should enjoy ‘only the degree of freedom consonant with the public welfare and the course Prussia must take in European politics’.

In 1862 Bismarck, still a professional diplomat, made a visit to London and elaborated his ambitions to Disraeli and other guests at dinner with the Russian ambassador. He astonished them, listing his objectives as being to force the Prussian assembly to pay for a new army, find a pretext for war with Austria, dissolve the old German confederacy and unite a new Germany under Prussian leadership. Disraeli warned the Austrian ambassador, ‘Take care of that man; he means what he says.’ Later that year Bismarck became ‘minister president’ of Prussia, dominant over a new Prussian king, Wilhelm I (1861–88). He told his assembly that Vienna had left Prussia with unsatisfactory boundaries, while ‘the great questions of the time will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions – the mistake of 1848 – but by iron and blood’. The message was clear: when Prussia said the Concert of Europe was over, it was over.

Bismarck and Austria

The first obstacle in Bismarck’s way was Austria, ghost of the Holy Roman Empire and recently humiliated by Cavour and France in Italy. Bismarck knew the German states were suspicious of Prussia, and would prefer the light-touch ‘presidency’ of Austria to his iron grip. He also knew that Russia would be crucial to his designs. It had been Austria’s ally at Olmütz, but that alliance had become estranged through Austria’s neutrality during the Crimean War. Bismarck took advantage of another Polish revolt against Russia in 1863, in which most of Europe was on Poland’s side, by offering St Petersburg his support. In return Russia would stay neutral if Prussia found itself at war with Austria.

Bismarck had his ducks in a row. France was distracted by a proxy war in Mexico. In London Disraeli had loftily declared that Britain was ‘no longer a mere European power … She is the metropolis of a great maritime empire, more an Asiatic power than a European one.’ Austria’s restless Hungarians were still demanding independence from Austria, which Bismarck encouraged. In July 1866, on a trumped-up excuse, he sent the Prussian army by rail into the Austrian province of Bohemia, under a general who became the ‘iron and blood’ of Prussian aggression, Helmuth von Moltke.

Prussia took the field against the Austrians at the Battle of Sadová (or Königgrätz) and defeated them utterly. Bismarck then insisted that Austria cede Venice to Italy, and grant Hungary parallel status in a new Habsburg ‘dual monarchy’ of Austria-Hungary. Budapest was declared the equal of Vienna, with a magnificent parliament built on the Danube, a bizarre cross between the Palace of Westminster and St Peter’s in Rome. Hungary was given its own assembly and government, and also its own army. Such honour was conspicuously not conferred on others in Austria’s remaining empire: Bohemians, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats and Slovenes.

Within months, most of the twenty-two north German states had been encouraged to join a Prussia-led northern confederacy under a new ‘German’ constitution and Reichstag, elected on universal male suffrage. This parliament had no control over the Prussian government or its defence budget. When King Wilhelm was shocked at even this reform, Bismarck told him that ‘universal suffrage would put you on a rock from which the waters cannot reach you’. To Bismarck, the suffrage was a sop to democracy. A proletarian franchise would prove a conservative brake not a radical force, a bulwark for autocracy against bourgeois liberalism. Bismarck was an early populist.

The south German states remained independent, but were made to sign military treaties with Berlin. They were offered choices that they could not refuse: Bismarck later admitted, ‘Our linen was not always of the cleanest.’ Yet he proceeded carefully. He did not press territorial demands on Austria, or seek its further humiliation. It was enough that the Habsburgs had lost all claim over the new Germany, which was to be a Prussian domain. Bismarck was applauded as ‘Germany’s George Washington’.

In just six years, between 1860 and 1866, the political map of Europe had been transformed. A new and powerful Germany had come into existence, as had a new, if not powerful, Italy. This had come to pass not through riots or revolutions, but through the talents of two conservatives, Cavour and Bismarck. At that same time, across the Atlantic, the United States of America was recovering from a bitter civil war (1861–5), of which the outcome was a new American federalism that would advance economically at breakneck speed. These two great federations, a union of German states and a union of American ones, were born of the same north European Protestant origins and bred in the same decade. They were to dominate the next half-century in Europe’s story.

Bismarck and France

Unlike Napoleon’s, Bismarck’s ambitions were strategic and limited. He did not seek an empire, merely Prussia’s pre-eminence in the new Europe. Though officially a servant of the Prussian state, Bismarck was already acknowledged across Europe to have at his call an obedient monarch, a well-equipped army and a capacity for unprovoked aggression. He had made an ally of Russia, crushed Austria and united Germany. Next on his agenda was France.

Why Bismarck should regard France as in need of conquest was unclear. It might still hover on the European stage as the land of Louis XIV, and still with a Bonaparte on its throne, but it threatened no one. To Bismarck its chief transgression was to exist and, like Austria in 1866, not to have been defeated by him. He duly asserted that its defeat ‘must take place before the construction of a united Germany’.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 was as pointless as that over Crimea. Neither side had a serious territorial or similar dispute with the other. Napoleon was sensitive of France’s virility, still dreaming of his uncle’s glories. But the only reason for war was that Bismarck so evidently wanted it, and the French high command was happy to fight one, as it could not imagine it would lose. The excuse was a parody of the War of the Spanish Succession, a dispute over the suitability of a German candidate for the Madrid throne. France declared itself ‘offended’ at the exception taken by the Prussian king to France’s stance on the matter. In truth, the dispute was engineered by Bismarck as a provocation – and was treated as such in Paris. As was drearily familiar, two European elites went to war because they had trained all their lives to do so.

By summer 1870 politicians on both sides were seized by the fever. In Germany the southern states rallied, as intended, to Bismarck’s cause and joined the north. Armies were mobilized, in France chaotically, in Germany efficiently. Prussian units, aided by carefully disposed railways, were at the French border in a matter of days, with King Wilhelm and Bismarck in attendance. The French army took weeks to assemble and performed disastrously in initial encounters. It was soon defeated by von Moltke at the Battle of Sedan, and Napoleon was captured. The Germans marched on Paris unopposed.

The city was besieged for four months, from September 1870 to January 1871. Parisians starved, finally eating cats, dogs and zoo animals. The killing of the two elephants, Castor and Pollux, caused a minor sensation, their meat selling at a premium in the Boulevard Haussmann. It was described by the English journalist Henry Labouchere as ‘tough, coarse and oily’ and not recommended to English families. A popular hero, Léon Gambetta, contrived to escape in a balloon and raise an army, even inflicting a minor defeat on a Prussian force.

When Paris finally capitulated, Prussian troops marched through its streets and on to Versailles. French humiliation was complete when a new German empire was declared in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors. A subsequent French election chose Adolphe Thiers, a veteran of the 1830 and 1848 revolutions, to negotiate a final deal with Bismarck. This secured the departure of the Prussian army, but at the price of the transfer of most of Alsace and part of Lorraine to the German crown. France did not forget this loss, so cynically engineered by Bismarck. Europe was widely said to have ‘lost a mistress and gained a master’.

Thiers’ settlement was extremely unpopular in Paris and, in March 1871, an uprising led to the brief establishment of a Paris Commune. It was a throwback to 1792, its anthem ‘La Marseillaise’ rather than the communist ‘Internationale’. The commune was suppressed by the forces of the new republican government after two months, with a brutality typical of France’s treatment of its rebels. As many as 10,000 people died in a round of fighting and mass executions. The writer Émile Zola noted that he had ‘never in civilized times seen such a terrible crime … The sound of firing squads, which one still hears in the mournful city, atrociously prolongs the nightmare.’ A Third Republic was declared, but Paris saw a mass exodus of any who could afford it to London, including the artists Tissot, Pissarro and Monet, the last exquisitely to evoke the Palace of Westminster in a London smog.

What had been a Prussia of sixteen million people, in confederation with some forty traditionally non-aggressive German states, was now a Germany of forty-one million people, the biggest nation in Europe after Russia. In 1873 Bismarck set the seal on his new creation with a Dreikaiserbund, a Three Emperors League, of Russia, Austria and Germany. He formally declared a new balance of power in Europe, assuring one and all that Germany was a ‘satiated power’.

Bismarck and the Congress of Berlin

If Bismarck was satiated, that was not true of the Russian government under Alexander II. In 1875, long-simmering Balkan resentment against Ottoman rule erupted into fighting in Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria. Bulgaria’s uprising in 1876 was suppressed by the Turks with extreme violence, some 12,000 civilians being massacred in reprisals. European opinion was shocked at what was regarded as genocide by Muslim Turks against Christian Slavs. Alexander needed no invitation to recover from the Crimean fiasco. He decided he would head a campaign of pan-Slavic liberation from the Turkish yoke. War broke out in 1877 and saw the Russians drive ill-equipped Turkish forces from virtually all the Balkans. Under the Treaty of San Stefano, a Russian protectorate was set up over a large new Bulgaria, extending across the entire north of the Balkans and with the tsar’s nephew as its king. The Ottoman empire – widely dismissed as ‘the sick man of Europe’ – was humbled and Russia brought once more to the gates of Constantinople.

Despite public sympathy for the Bulgars, Europe remained as averse to Russian expansionism as it had been at the time of the Crimean War. Turkey was still a useful buffer against Russia. Diplomatic pressure – Britain said it would even declare war if Constantinople were captured – induced Russia to agree to a new Congress of Europe. This was summoned by Bismarck to Berlin in the summer of 1878, with the intention of doing for eastern Europe what the Congress of Vienna had done for the west. It was to be his hour of triumph.

Bismarck did not personally care about the Balkans, regarding them as ‘not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier’. He did care about Russia. The congress severely clipped Russia’s wings. It halved the new Bulgaria, propped up Turkey and splintered the Balkans between its component peoples, with an independent Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro. Turkey kept Macedonia, but was detached from Bulgaria. Bosnia went to Austria-Hungary. Berlin was a classic European carve-up, with no nonsense about consultation or self-determination. But it emphatically indicated where the continent’s centre of power lay, in the new Germany.

For Britain’s prime minister, Disraeli (1868, 1874–80), Berlin was a reversion to Castlereagh, a careful British toe dipped into European diplomacy. His strategy was primarily directed at India. In 1875 he had enhanced imperial security by acquiring almost half the Suez Canal shares from France. A year later he delighted Queen Victoria with the title of Empress of India. He made a room at his house at Hughenden a museum of the Berlin congress (now open to the public). As for Turkey, Disraeli had been savaged by Gladstone during the Bulgarian atrocities for going soft on the Turks. Gladstone was vicious: ‘There is not a cannibal in the South Sea islands whose indignation would not rise and over-boil’ at Disraeli’s policy. The latter replied that Gladstone was, ‘of all Bulgarian horrors, perhaps the greatest’. There is nothing new in political invective.

Russia was deeply unhappy. The tsar described Berlin as ‘a coalition of Europe against Russia, under the leadership of Prince Bismarck’. Since an alliance with Russia had been an anchor of Bismarck’s earlier diplomacy, this was a troubling sign of the great man’s loss of touch. As he grew older, Bismarck grew paranoid, seeing leftist conspiracies everywhere. He professed to trust only Britain, though he deplored any country, he said, which kept sacking its rulers ‘on the whim of an electorate’. Only exhausted Austria was in Bismarck’s good books. With the ink barely dry on the Berlin agreement, he in 1879 duly signed a secret treaty with Austria-Hungary, committing both parties to help each other ‘with the whole war strength of their empires’ in the event of an attack by Russia. Three years later this was extended to embrace Italy. The Triple Alliance echoed the Holy Roman Empire. It also alienated Russia. Yet it was Bismarck who had once remarked, ‘What we learn from history is that nobody learns from history.’

Europe in the 1880s was seeing the same industrial growth and social transformation that Britain had experienced a century before. With the opening up of the grasslands of the Americas and Australasia, costs across Europe were falling. Cheap grain and refrigerated meat flooded food markets but caused an agricultural recession across Europe. The new rich were not landowners but manufacturers and distributors, bankers and traders. The change in newly united Germany was most dramatic. Coal output quintupled and seaborne trade rose seven-fold in thirty years. The Berlin government sponsored industrial cartels, notably in the new technologies of chemicals and electricity, protecting them with tariffs. It promoted industrial training, built universities and planned suburbs.

Bismarck was alert to socialism’s appeal. He introduced Europe’s first hint of a welfare state, a government insurance scheme against sickness, accidents at work and old age, though with no protection against unemployment. It was a barter, in return for penal laws against the propagation of socialism and other forms of dissent. The German proletariat was to be kept protected, comfortable and subservient. Prosperity was exchanged for obedience as the motif of the modern state.

The climax of the age of empire

The 1878 Congress of Berlin had led to an undignified ‘scramble for Africa’ by European governments, supposedly prevented from pursuing further adventures at home. Leaders sought pride in distant conquests. French governments might be unable to regain Alsace-Lorraine, but they could conquer Tunis and settle Vietnam. Belgians were setting foot in the mineral-rich Congo basin, the Portuguese were confirmed in Angola and Mozambique and the Italians in north and east Africa. In the lead was still Britain, though its reach was starting to exceed its grasp. In southern Africa it was challenged by both Zulus and Dutch Afrikaners. In Sudan General Gordon’s army was massacred by the Mahdi.

To this aggrandizement Bismarck was immune. As a virtually landlocked nation, his Germany had concerns that were the opposite of Britain’s. ‘I am no man for colonies,’ he said. But he was now Europe’s unofficial ‘chairman’. He duly called another Berlin conference in 1885, supposedly to settle the map of Africa. It acknowledged Britain’s overwhelming presence ‘from Cairo to the Cape’, but was determined to keep Britain out of the Congo basin. Bismarck proposed it as the private fiefdom of King Leopold of Belgium, which the latter ruled with peculiar extortion and brutality. Against Bismarck’s better judgement, even Germany joined in and accepted what are now Namibia, Tanzania, Togo and Cameroon.

Elsewhere in the world, boundaries were being drawn by European governments, as if the globe were their plaything. In the Far East, Britain and Portugal strengthened their position on the Chinese coast. The Dutch were dominant in the East Indies. The French expanded into Indo-China. In the central Asian land mass, Russia’s empire reached the far coast of Siberia, until barely a quarter of its land area was west of the Urals. Russian Alaska had been sold to America in 1867, while Russia’s southern border touched Persia and Afghanistan. The new tsar, Nicholas II (1894–1917), even dreamt of adding Manchuria and Korea.

The death in 1888 of the nonagenarian Wilhelm I of Prussia, and shortly afterwards of his son, passed the crown to his twenty-nine-year-old grandson, Wilhelm II (1888–1918). The new king was physically disabled, vain and bad-tempered. He immediately declared, ‘There is only one master in this country and I am he.’ Wilhelm shocked Europe by promptly dismissing Bismarck, to a flurry of cartoons depicting the ship of Europe dropping its pilot. Of all the statesmen who had fashioned modern Europe, Bismarck was the most effective. Germany would have come into existence without him, but not when and how it did. Circumstance gave him the opportunity to create a new nation and he took it, but he took it by the projection of extreme force. As the strategist John Lewis Gaddis writes, he ‘unified the country by provoking wars, but then secured peace by balancing resentments’.

The legacy of Bismarck’s diplomacy was that these resentments were unstable, when he was not present to control them. His triple alliance with Austria and Italy reopened old insecurities. Three years later, in 1891, France and Russia felt obliged to form a dual alliance in response, and this induced in the paranoid Wilhelm a fear of encirclement. Central Europe’s states were constant victims of their own geography. Yet again they were returning to type.

Fin de siècle

The statesmen who had kept Europe free of cataclysmic war over the century since Vienna had passed on. Talleyrand and Metternich were long gone. Gladstone stepped down as prime minister in 1894. An election in 1895 was won by a Tory aristocrat, Lord Salisbury. His foreign policy was traditional, one of ‘splendid isolation’, doing as little as possible while Britain ‘drifted lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a boat-hook to avoid collision’. As for intervening in the internal affairs of other European states, said Salisbury, ‘there is no practice which the experience of nations more uniformly condemns, and none which governments more consistently pursue’. He would not.

Despite Bismarck’s departure, as the century drew to a close there seemed nothing that need trouble Europe’s equanimity. Britain’s Queen Victoria, sovereign to twenty per cent of the world’s population, was grandmother to Germany’s Wilhelm, who paid her regular visits. The Prince of Wales holidayed in France, and spoke its language fluently. Tourism to the riviera of France and Italy boomed. The years of 1871–1914 were rightly called the belle époque.

In honour of such optimism, the tsar in 1899 summoned a peace conference to The Hague at which he invited Europe to agree, if not to abolish war, at least to promote disarmament and limit any new and terrible weapons coming onto the production line. It took forward the Geneva Convention of 1864 on the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants. It banned the destruction and looting of occupied towns. It forbade the dropping of bombs and gas from balloons, and attacks on civilian populations. A court of arbitration was set up to which conflicting states could take their case. The text stated, ‘The battlefield as a place of settlement of disputes is gradually yielding to arbitral courts of justice.’ Everyone appeared to agree.

Against this hopeful background, Europe’s capitals sprouted with exhibitions, museums and other attractions, many of them reflecting the continent’s global supremacy. Imperial competition demanded domestic expression. Britain’s India Office in Whitehall was built round a Durbar Court and Queen Victoria was attended at her house at Osborne by turbaned Indian servants. In Belgium, Congolese ‘native villages’ were constructed, with real natives diving for coins. In 1900, Paris built a Grand Palais, where it staged a Universal Exposition with pavilions by forty countries. It was declared ‘a symbol of harmony and peace for all humanity’. It had fifty million visitors.

As the twentieth century dawned, Europe held half the world’s population under its sway and controlled eighty-five per cent of world trade. London’s six and a half million people made it by far the biggest city on Earth. No other continent or group of peoples had ever claimed such mastery over the planet. This supremacy gave rise to a sense that Europeans were a superior race, with a right – and perhaps a duty – to conquer others, to rule them and convert them to Christianity. This power represented a Europe that had reached an evolutionary climax, and was tempted to define the word civilization in its own terms. It was the moment when it flew too close to the sun.