Dismissal of Bismarck
Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck in March 1890 after two years of trying to govern around him. Bismarck had been chancellor for twenty-eight years and had made the emperor's grandfather emperor. The new sovereign was twenty-nine, had come to the throne in 1888 after his father's ninety-nine-day reign, and had absorbed a view of the office that made a chancellor of that stature intolerable. The immediate quarrels were three. Bismarck wanted the anti-socialist law renewed with a provision for expelling agitators, and Wilhelm wanted to conciliate the workers with factory legislation; Bismarck revived a cabinet order of 1852 requiring ministers to report to the chancellor rather than to the crown; and the emperor learned that Bismarck had been meeting the Centre Party leader without telling him. Behind them was foreign policy. Bismarck's system rested on keeping Russia attached to Germany through the Reinsurance Treaty, and the men around Wilhelm regarded it as incompatible with the Austrian alliance and let it lapse within months of his going. Bismarck was asked for his resignation and wrote a long letter of grievance that was not published until after his death. Punch printed the cartoon of the pilot being dropped, which is how the episode is remembered everywhere. Russia signed with France in 1894, which is the alliance Bismarck had spent twenty years preventing, and Germany faced two fronts in 1914. He died in 1898 predicting a European catastrophe in about that time. The dismissal is also a case study in institutional design. Bismarck had built a constitution in which the chancellor answered to the monarch and not to parliament, on the assumption that he would always be the chancellor, and it worked exactly as designed the moment a monarch wanted somebody else.
- Year: 1890 CE
- Category: Political
