German Unification
Germany was unified in January 1871 by three wars in seven years, and the wars were the point. The liberal attempt of 1848 had failed: the Frankfurt parliament spent a year debating a constitution and offered a crown to a Prussian king who would not take one from an assembly. Bismarck's method was the opposite of that. He came to office in 1862 in a constitutional crisis over the army budget, governed without a budget for four years, and told the deputies that the great questions would be settled by iron and blood. The wars were each designed to isolate an opponent and to stop at the right moment. Denmark in 1864 was fought jointly with Austria to create a quarrel with Austria; Austria in 1866 was beaten in seven weeks and then treated with striking leniency, losing no territory, because Bismarck expected to need it; France in 1870 was manoeuvred into declaring war on a German nation rather than on Prussia, which brought the southern states in under treaties they had signed in 1866. The empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles while Paris was under siege. Its constitution was the North German one extended: universal male suffrage for a Reichstag with no power to appoint or dismiss a government, a chancellor responsible to the emperor alone, and a federal council in which Prussia held a veto. Germany became the strongest state in Europe in twenty years, on institutions designed to prevent anyone but Bismarck governing it. Bismarck spent the following nineteen years explaining to everyone that Germany was satiated and wanted nothing more, and building alliances to keep France isolated. He was dismissed in 1890 by a young emperor who let the arrangement lapse within two years.
- Year: 1871 CE
- Category: Political
