500 Chapter 25
but he was beaten in a small skirmish and retired to his
farm, where he plowed fields behind a team of jackasses
he named Napoleon III, Pius IX, and Immaculate Con-
ception. In one sense, the new Italy also included few
Italians; barely 2 percent of the population spoke the
Italian language, and most of the nation spoke local di-
alects. As one wit observed, because Italy now existed it
would be necessary to invent the Italians.
Bismarck and the Unification
of Germany
Following the revolutions of 1848, Germany remained
a loose confederation of thirty-nine independent states:
one empire (Austria), five kingdoms (Prussia, Bavaria,
Württemberg, Saxony, and Hanover), one princedom
(Hesse), and an assortment of grand duchies, duchies,
principalities, and free cities. Although the Habsburgs
had long dominated central European affairs, the lead-
ership of the German states was shifting to Prussia for
many reasons. The expansion of Prussia at Vienna in
1815 had affirmed Prussian dominance of northern
Germany. The German states north of the Main River
were also oriented toward Prussia by the confessional
division of Germany into a Protestant north and
Catholic south. States such as Hanover (95.7 percent
Protestant), Hesse (83.1 percent), Mecklenburg (99.3
percent), and Saxony (98.1 percent) were more com-
fortable with Lutheran Prussia than with Catholic Aus-
tria; many of their leaders had been educated at the
Protestant universities of Jena and Berlin. Industrial
leadership and command of the Zollverein also made
Prussia the economic leader of central Europe. German
liberals preferred Prussian to Austrian leadership. Nei-
ther could be mistaken for a radical republic, but the
Prussian record of reforms, from Stein and Hardenburg
in 1807 to the constitution of 1850 (with an elective
Landtag), was more appealing than the oppression of
Metternich or Schwarzenberg.
The Prussian domination of Germany ultimately
depended upon the army. Prussia, alone among the
great powers, had not gone to war since the defeat of
Napoleon, so statesmen did not appreciate the impor-
tance of Prussian army reforms undertaken by Gerhard
von Scharnhorst and Count von Gneissenau after 1806.
They had made all Prussian men liable for military ser-
vice between ages twenty and thirty-nine, including a
well-organized system of reserve duty that made the
army potentially much larger than its apparent size.
They had also adopted the revolutionary principle of
commissioning and promoting officers on the basis of
ability, abolishing the aristocratic monopoly of rank
(yet perpetuating some exclusions, such as Jews), and
had created schools in which to train officers and a
General Staff to provide the army with organization
and planning. The Prussian General Staff had been
quick to learn the lessons of war in the industrial age;
they had, in the words of the nationalist historian
Heinrich von Treitschke, “faith in the God who
made iron.”
The international tensions of the 1850s convinced
the new king of Prussia, William I, that further reforms
of the army were in order. In 1859 William named a
new minister of war, General Albert von Roon, to su-
pervise those reforms; Roon, in turn, selected a friend,
General Helmuth von Moltke, to serve as chief of the
general staff. Roon and Moltke needed a great deal of
money for this undertaking, but their attempt to get fi-
nancing precipitated a constitutional battle with the
Landtag, where a liberal majority claimed the constitu-
tional right to approve such expenditures. Roon fulmi-
nated that “in the sewer of doctrinaire liberalism,
Prussia will rot without redemption,” but the liberals
held out. The constitutional battle over the Prussian
budget lasted for nearly three years before a desperate
king selected another of Roon’s friends, Otto von
Bismarck, to head the government. Bismarck was a hot-
headed and mistrustful Junker who had followed a civil
service career to ambassadorial posts in Frankfurt, St.
Petersburg, and Paris. He was also a brilliantly prag-
matic conservative who favored Realpolitik(a policy of
realism) to defend the old order. As Bismarck put it, he
“listened for the footsteps of God through history, and
tried to grab hold of His coattails.” Bismarck’s Realpolitik
made him at times a virtual dictator, led Prussia into
three wars during the 1860s, and shoved German liber-
als into outer darkness; but at the end of his term as
chancellor, a Prussian-dominated Germany was the
strongest state in Europe.
Bismarck defeated the Landtag liberals by ignoring
them and the constitution. He decided that “necessity
alone is authoritative” and acted without legislative ap-
proval. Bismarck levied taxes, collected revenue, and
spent money—all without legislation, without a bud-
get, and without accounting. Roon and Moltke ac-
quired breech-loading rifles ( Johann von Dreyse’s
“needle gun”) and Krupp cannons; these weapons soon
acquired substantial real estate. “Better pointed bullets
than pointed speeches,” Bismarck felt. He explained
his audacity in one of the most famous speeches of
the century. He told a Landtag committee that it was
the army that made Prussia great, not liberal ideals.