German Unification

An assembly of professors and lawyers drafted a constitution for a country that did not exist, while the armies that would decide the question belonged to the kings they hoped to persuade. The Parliament had no force and no revenue, and everything that followed was determined by that absence.

Frederick William refused a crown from the gutter because accepting it meant war with Austria on terms chosen by other people. Whatever the language of divine right, the calculation was sound: he was being offered a title without the means to hold it.

He was appointed to break a parliamentary deadlock over army funding, and broke it by collecting taxes the chamber had refused to vote. The blood and iron speech was not rhetoric but a programme: questions of this kind would be settled by force, and the constitution would not be allowed to obstruct it.

Two rivals fought a small war together, and the shared spoils became the quarrel Bismarck needed. Prussia and Austria administering Schleswig and Holstein jointly was an arrangement designed to fail. He acquired a pretext in advance and kept it in reserve for two years.

Seven weeks decided who would organise Germany, and Bismarck then refused to take an inch of Austrian territory or to march into Vienna. Restraint at the moment of victory is rarer than victory. He wanted Austria available as a future partner, and thirteen years later he had one.

The constitution gave the Prussian king command of the army, control of foreign policy and a chancellor answerable only to him. Everything else was decoration. Bismarck built a federal facade over Prussian control, and the document's genius is how much it conceded in form and how little in substance.

Bismarck edited a telegram so that a courteous exchange read as an insult, and France declared war within days. The Ems dispatch is the most studied provocation in diplomatic history because it worked so precisely: he needed France to strike first so the southern states' defensive treaties would activate.

Proclaiming the empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, in the occupied palace of the defeated enemy, was a choice. It announced that the new order rested on victory and intended everyone to know it. Symbolism of that kind is a form of deterrence, and it was also a permanent grievance.

Unification was never merely a German question. Austria and Prussia each preferred no Germany to a Germany led by the other, and France and Russia preferred no Germany at all. Any solution had to survive the system, which meant it would be settled by whoever could fight rather than whoever could draft.

Accepting would have required defeating Austria, which Prussia in 1849 could not do, as Olmütz demonstrated the following year. The refusal was an accurate reading of the balance. Seventeen years later the same crown was taken, because by then the capabilities had changed and the balance permitted it.

The dispute was about army reform, which is to say about Prussia's capacity to act in a system where Austria, France and Russia all had views on Germany. Bismarck's constitutional violence was in service of capability, and every later success rested on the reorganised army the crisis bought.

The great powers stood aside: Britain would not act alone, France was distracted, Russia was grateful for Prussian help over Poland. Bismarck's achievement was to fight only when the rest of the system was neutralised, which is his whole method compressed into one campaign.

Prussia won on mobilisation: railways, a general staff, breech-loading rifles and shorter interior lines. The Austrian army was not less brave but less organised for speed. Nineteenth-century capability had become a matter of logistics and administration, and Prussia had built both first.

Twenty-two states pooling their armies under one command created a central European power that changed the continental balance immediately. France recognised this and began looking for compensation, which set up 1870. The aggregation of capabilities was the provocation, whatever anyone intended by it.

France went to war to prevent a German power on its eastern frontier and created one. Preventive action against a rising neighbour is a standard response to shifting capabilities, and it fails when the rise has already happened. Napoleon III moved a decade late, with an army configured for colonial policing.

A unified Germany with the continent's best army and fastest-growing industry, wedged between France and Russia, was a structural problem from its first day. Bismarck spent twenty years managing it through alliances; his successors did not. The position he created proved harder to hold than to win.

The Frankfurt constitution was a serious liberal document: a bill of rights, an elected chamber, ministerial responsibility, trial by jury. It failed and its text supplied the template for German constitutionalism afterwards. Defeated constitutions have a way of being consulted by the regimes that defeated them.

A crown offered by an elected assembly derives from popular sovereignty, and that was the part he could not accept. The refusal was doctrinal as well as strategic: it insisted legitimacy descends from God to princes and does not ascend from voters, a position with a long future in Germany.

The Prussian chamber held the budget power and Bismarck governed without a budget for four years, then asked to be indemnified after victory, and was. Liberals traded the constitutional principle for the national outcome, a bargain that shaped German politics until 1918.

German liberals wanted the duchies for the German nation under a German duke, and Bismarck fought instead for the legal claims of the London Protocol, then annexed the territory outright. He used national enthusiasm as fuel while conceding it nothing, and the liberals cheered anyway.

Victory dissolved the constitutional crisis. The chamber voted the indemnity Bismarck requested, the National Liberals split, and Prussian liberalism largely made its peace with a state that delivered national goals. Success abroad purchased acquiescence at home, a transaction with very long consequences.

The Reichstag was elected by universal male suffrage, broader than Britain or France at the time, and it could not appoint or dismiss a minister. Bismarck's insight was that a wide franchise without responsible government produces a legislature that complains rather than one that rules.

The Second Empire had staked its legitimacy on military glory and had no other reserve, so Sedan destroyed the regime along with the army. Within days Paris proclaimed a republic and fought on. Regimes resting on prestige cannot survive its loss, whereas the nation beneath one can.

The empire was proclaimed by princes, not by a parliament, and the constitution made the chancellor answerable to the emperor alone. Unification arrived with the national half of the liberal programme fulfilled and the constitutional half abandoned, a division that shaped German politics until 1918 and beyond.

The delegates spent months on the boundary problem, whether a German state should include Austria's non-German lands, and could not resolve it because no procedure existed that could. The assembly lacked any mechanism for deciding rather than debating, which is the difference between a parliament and a seminar.

The assembly's offer was its only instrument and it had no fallback. When the crown was declined the Parliament had nothing left and was dispersed by troops within weeks. Bargaining from a position with a single option and no enforcement is not bargaining, and the rulers understood this before the delegates did.

The constitution had a gap: it did not say what happens when crown and chamber cannot agree a budget. Bismarck occupied the gap and called it a theory. Written rules fail at exactly the points their drafters did not anticipate, and a determined executive will find those points.

The Gastein Convention divided administration, Schleswig to Prussia and Holstein to Austria, and every subsequent friction ran through that arrangement. It was an institutional design chosen for its instability. Sometimes the point of a mechanism is to generate the disputes its author intends to escalate.

The Confederation created at Vienna was dissolved outright, along with the machinery of German coexistence that had lasted half a century. Bismarck replaced it rather than reforming it, because the existing institution guaranteed Austria a veto. Institutions are hardest to fix when their design is the obstacle.

The federation worked because it solved real coordination problems. A customs union already existed, and a common currency, postal system, commercial code and legal framework followed. States joined a structure that made them richer, which made the political subordination considerably easier to accept.

The German war effort ran on railway timetables, a mobilisation plan revised annually and a general staff that existed in peacetime to prepare it. France improvised. The organisational advantage was built over a decade and was decisive in six weeks, which is the characteristic ratio of institutions to events.

Behind the ceremony sat treaties, a customs union, a common currency and reserved rights for Bavaria and Württemberg that made accession bearable. Federations are built from such bargains. The institutional detail is what persuaded the southern states to enter, and it is invisible in the painting.

Frankfurt asserted that a nation might constitute a state by its own act, without a sovereign's grant. Europe's monarchies found the claim intolerable precisely because it was general. Admitting nations as members of international society alongside dynasties would have unmade half the continent's existing states.

The princes closed ranks because a constitution granted from below threatened every throne in the Confederation, not merely the Prussian one. Monarchical solidarity operated as a rule of the German states system, and it held on this occasion, as it had at Verona and would again.

He conducted foreign policy as a matter of interest and combination rather than of monarchical solidarity, cultivating Russia, isolating Austria and using France. This was the older reason-of-state tradition reasserted against the Holy Alliance's ideology, and it suited the century far better.

The war was fought over the interpretation of an 1852 treaty, and both sides argued their case in its terms. Great powers going to war over treaty construction is an odd spectacle and a revealing one: the legal form was worth maintaining even by those about to discard it.

The Peace of Prague redrew central Europe without a congress and without consulting the other guarantors of the 1815 settlement. That was the Concert's practical end. When one power can revise the European public law unilaterally and unpunished, the law has ceased to be public.

A new great power appeared in the centre of Europe by constitutional document rather than by conquest, and its neighbours had to decide how to treat it. International society absorbed the change without a general war for four years, largely because the form was federal and reassuringly technical.

The siege and bombardment of Paris, the treatment of irregulars and the annexation of an unwilling population all strained conventions Europe had been developing since 1815. The war was fought between recognisable states and ended by pushing at every limit those states had agreed on.

Europe now had a different set of great powers, and the German Empire was recognised without controversy because it was plainly a state that could act as one. International society registers power quickly and asks about legitimacy afterwards, if at all.

Before an army or a border, unification needed Germans who thought of themselves as such, and that had been built for decades by philologists, historians, choral societies and gymnasts. Frankfurt was the political expression of a national identity already existing in culture and not yet in law.

The year fixed a story German liberals told about themselves for a century: that unity had been sought by argument and refused, and would therefore have to be obtained some other way. That lesson made many of them willing to accept, later, a unification delivered on Bismarck's terms.

Bismarck was a Junker conservative who made himself the agent of a national movement he distrusted, and the manoeuvre worked because unification could mean different things to different constituencies. Keeping the meaning of unity ambiguous was a political resource he spent carefully.

The duchies mobilised German opinion as nothing had since 1848, and Bismarck harvested that feeling for a policy that had little to do with it. The gap between why a public supports a war and why a government fights it is wide, and national sentiment is easily borrowed.

The war settled that Germany would be a nation-state without Austria, a definition that had been genuinely open. Millions of German speakers were placed outside the nation by a seven-week campaign, and the question of who belonged stayed combustible in Austrian identity for eighty years.

Calling it the North German Confederation kept the southern states' future open while making union feel inevitable, and Bismarck signed military treaties with them the same year. The name was a holding position. What people expect to happen shapes what they will accept when it does.

France entered as an empire and left as a republic with a lost province, and Alsace-Lorraine became the fixed point of French national feeling for two generations. A territorial transfer decided in a fortnight organised the identity and the foreign policy of a great power until 1919.

Anton von Werner painted the scene more than once, each version adjusted for its patron, and Germans learned the founding from those pictures. A nation acquired its origin story in a French palace, told by an artist working to order. Founding myths are commissioned as often as they are experienced.