1848: The People's Spring.
Springtime of nations.
The Year of Revolution.
Music (Birth of the People)
Bismarck's poltical life ended nearly as abruptly as it started.
For as the summer of 1847 began,
the King, unable to get a railroad grant from the Diet, without also granting a constitution,
threw his hands up in the air, dissolved the Diet, and sent everyone packing.
Bismarck went back home to his estate,
finally completed that whole business of getting married,
and went on his honeymoon.
But as he traveled Europe, and when he went home,
he noticed a strange tension in the air.
An unrest in the streets, in the cities.
Then, in February 1848,
Paris erupted.
The monarchy fell.
A republic was re-established in France.
Bismarck was concerned.
At home, and abroad, he had seen the strain between the working class and those who ruled.
But he never expected something so abrupt, or so successful to happen in France.
Then, Vienna fell.
Metternich, the great Austrian statesman and architect of the concert of Europe, was displaced.
This opened up an opportunity,
as the Austrians had long been the dominant force among German states.
But it also served as a warning.
It was clear that revolution was coming to Prussia soon.
But Bismarck worried that the king was too weak and too vacillating to put down a revolution.
And, he was right.
As word of the revolution in Vienna spread,
Prussians took to the streets, and soon, the king promised them a constitutional government.
But as the people were celebrating their victory in Berlin,
the celebration turned into a clash.
Shots were fired, government troops killed revolutionaries.
Many, including Bismarck, believed that now, there was no choice but to crush the revolution.
The king, though, disagreed, and ordered the troops out of Berlin,
effectively leaving himself hostage to the revolution.
And then came the first of Bismarck's good(...ish) ideas.
He raced back to his estate, and organized an old-school peasant levy.
Yes, in the middle of the 19th century, he tried to press his peasants into service as their feudal lord,
in order to put down a revolution, whose stated goals were to enfranchise and empower those same peasants.
With this "great" idea in mind,
he handed them all shotguns, and said,
"C'mon lads, to Berlin!"
But, just as they were storming off,
one of his spoilsport neighbors came out, and told him to stop hurling a firebrand into the country,
threatening to talk the peasants out of this nonsense.
Bismarck politely replied,
"You know that I am a quiet man, but,
if you do that,
I shall shoot you."
So with revolver in hand, and four, yes four, bullets in his pocket,
he led his feudal levy to go liberate the king.
Unfortunately, when he got to the first army camp,
which was staffed by many of the conservative officers that he had come to mingle with
after making his fiery speeches in Berlin,
he was promptly told,
"Yes, we are all a bit disappointed right now,
but, no, we really don't want your peasant mob messing this up even more, so,
how 'bout you go send your peasants back,
and bring us some corn and potatoes or something."
Not content to serve as mere fodder provider for the army,
Otto then had his second good(...ish) idea.
He left his estate, and tried to sneak into Berlin, again,
with the cleverest of ruses;
trimming his beard.
Needless to say, many people saw through his incredible mind games, and he was laughed out of Berlin.
But Bismarck was not done.
He had a THIRD good(...ish) idea.
With the king making ever greater concessions to the revolutionaries,
Bismarck saw it as his place to help elevate one of the king's relatives to the throne.
So Bismarck went all in on trying to replace King Frederick Wilhelm,
with a confusingly, but more succinctly named King Wilhelm
But Wilhelm had legged it to England, and he wasn't going to listen to this wild man anyway.
So Bismarck began to hunt for a new candidate.
Soon, he found another royal relative named Charles, who proposed that his even more confusingly named son,
Frederick Wilhelm, should replace Frederick Wilhelm on the throne.
This Frederick Wilhelm, or "Fritz" (I'm gonna call him Fritz)
was 6 years old.
But nobody had asked Fritz's mom.
(I mean, they EVENTUALLY did, but more as an afterthought, with Bismarck awkwardly meeting her in her servant's quarters.)
Not asking turned out to be a mistake, though.
Because Fritz's mom supported the Liberals, and put the kibosh on the whole thing.
It would seem that Bismarck had made an enemy of the mother of this 6 year old he hoped to put on the throne.
Nonetheless, he was soon summoned for the second Prussian Diet,
which the king had ordered assembled to hammer out how to make a real parliament for Prussia.
There, Bismarck spoke passionately about the noble past that they were so casually throwing away,
even becoming choked with emotion and having to stop mid-speech.
But, to no avail.
The Diet did its job, and created the Prussian National Assembly, which Bismarck was very not elected to.
This Prussian National Assembly pushed for a real parliamentary system along British lines, though,
and soon, the king began to lose patience with the body.
So Bismarck joined the Camarilla,
[Which, was NOT, in fact, a secret society of vampires which has kept their presence hidden from humanity for hundreds of years.]
[Though, I can understand your confusion.]
[And let's be honest, Bismarck would have made a great vampire, but no.]
Bismarck joined the much more boring (but real) group of nobles and courtiers close to the king,
who were determined to maintain the power of the monarchy through non-vampiric means.
And let's go ahead and call this Bismarck's first ACTUAL good idea,
because this put him in contact with many powerful men.
But even though, by all accounts, he was an effective member of this society,
and even though he had amplified the conservative voice in Prussian politics, by establishing a newspaper,
when the liberal cause fell apart, and the conservatives, once again, became ascendant,
he was passed over for a cabinet posistion.
They were very happy to use him when a radical was needed,
but once the time came to re-establish order, the "Wildman" was cast aside.
So Bismarck returned to his estate to witness the birth of his first child.
But Bismarck had a plan.
Bismarck ALWAYS had a plan.
You see, even though the liberals HAD failed to get anything like the constitution they had wanted,
they HAD gotten a constitution.
And with it, a parliament, the Landtag.
And Bismarck, always a pragmatist, under whatever colors he may have worn,
decided to get himself elected to this new body.
The fight was fierce.
He knew that he wouldn't get elected in his own region, so, he decided to run for office in the city of Brandenburg,
but there, he was an outsider, running against the local mayor.
He acted with vigor, describing his campaign headquarters as a military camp,
with messengers running in and out at all hours,
and strategy being formulated so that he never missed an opportunity to speak to the few hundred men,
who would, eventually, determine the representative for Brandenburg.
He won by 25 votes.
Now, he was once again, at the center of things.
And the question at hand on everybody's mind, was the unification of Germany.
If the 39 German states that had survived the Napoleonic invasion banded together,
they could change the face of European politcs forever.
But how to achieve that was a matter of some debate.
They could either come together under Austria,
or, under Prussia.
But Austria rejected the possibility of unification.
Because the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Habsburg inherited lands
included far more more territory than just the German portions.
And the whole point of unification was German nationalism.
Germans would never accept rule by a sovereign who was also ruling over other nations.
This meant, that the Austrians would either have to divide their empire,
and give some other branch of the family their German territories,
or, simply reject unification outright.
(And they chose the latter.)
The German National Assembly, which was different from the Landtag,
in that, it represented ALL German states,
decided, with little other choice,
to offer the imperial crown to Frederick Wilhelm.
Nobles in the Landtag, including Bismarck, urged him to accept.
But the king rejected the proposal.
And this allowed Bismarck the opportunity to rail against the constitution that would have come with it.
He was BLASTED by the press, and sure of losing his seat in the next election.
But when the king dissolved the Landtag, he changed the election rules for the next session,
in ways that favored landowners, like Bismarck, which ensured his re-election.
After giving some blistering speeches on the role of the monarchy,
and some strong invectives against even the monarch's own move toward a constitutional unification,
Bismarck got himself moved to a new assembly, debating the question of unification.
But before that could go anywhere,
he got caught up in the next great conflict;
the war over territory seemed to loom between Austria and Prussia,
and it is here that we see the evolution of Bismarck.
Because, though, in many ways, he was, and always will be, a man of war,
when a settlement was offered, and many pushed to reject it, and go to war instead,
Bismarck rose, and said,
"It is unworthy of a great state, to fight for something which does not concern its own interest.
Gentlemen, show me an objective worthy of war, and I will go along with you.
It is easy enough for a statesman to ride the popular wave from the comfort of his own fireside,
making thunderous speeches from the rostrum,
letting the public sound the trumpets of war,
and leaving it to the musketeer, bleeding out his life's blood in the snowy wastes,
to settle whether policies end in glory, or in failure.
Nothing is simpler.
But, woe to any statesman, who, at such a time,
fails to find a cause of war, which will stand up to scrutiny, once the fighting is over."
And so begins the transformation of Bismarck the radical,
to Bismarck, man of realpolitik.
Music (Art of the Possible)