Kulturkampf — Bismarck's Conflict with the Catholic Church
Bismarck spent the 1870s trying to break the Catholic church's independence in Germany and lost. Roughly a third of the new empire was Catholic, concentrated in the Rhineland, Bavaria, Silesia and Polish Posen, and the Centre Party formed in 1870 to represent it and became the second largest in the Reichstag. Bismarck's objection was political rather than theological. A confessional party taking instructions, as he saw it, from an institution outside the state, in an empire that had just been built by excluding Catholic Austria and by beating Catholic France, looked to him like a fifth column — and the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870 confirmed it. The measures ran from 1871: the pulpit paragraph making political preaching a criminal offence, the expulsion of the Jesuits, state inspection of all schools, civil marriage made compulsory, and the May Laws of 1873 placing the training and appointment of clergy under state supervision. Resistance was near-total. Bishops refused to comply and were arrested or deported, hundreds of parishes were left without priests, and the Centre Party's vote doubled. Bismarck had produced exactly the organised Catholic bloc he feared. He began winding it down after 1878, when a new pope offered an opening and when he decided that the socialists were the more urgent enemy and would need Centre votes to suppress. Most of the laws were repealed or left unenforced by 1887; civil marriage and school inspection stayed. He later admitted he had underestimated the church. The word means struggle for civilisation and was coined approvingly by a liberal deputy, which indicates who was supporting it. The Centre Party it created governed the Weimar Republic repeatedly and is the ancestor of the Christian Democrats.
- Year: 1872 CE
- Category: Political
