Second Schleswig War
Prussia and Austria took Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark in 1864, and Bismarck used the quarrel over the spoils to fight Austria two years later. The duchies were an old constitutional tangle. Both were ruled by the Danish king personally, Holstein was a member of the German Confederation and Schleswig was not, and the two had been declared indivisible in a fifteenth-century charter that everyone cited. The crisis came when Denmark adopted a constitution in November 1863 incorporating Schleswig into the kingdom, in breach of an international agreement of 1852. German national opinion demanded action, and a German claimant to the duchies was available. Bismarck therefore did something that infuriated the nationalists: he ignored the claimant, ignored the Confederation, and acted jointly with Austria as the two great powers enforcing the treaty of 1852 — which kept Britain, France and Russia out and gave the operation a legal rather than a revolutionary character. The Danes abandoned the Danevirke without a fight and were beaten at Dybbøl in April after a bombardment lasting weeks. Denmark had expected British or Swedish help and got none. The peace ceded both duchies to Prussia and Austria jointly, which is the point of the whole exercise: two powers with no common border administering adjacent provinces together was a guaranteed quarrel. The Gastein convention of 1865 divided the administration, Prussia occupied Holstein in June 1866, and the Austro-Prussian war followed within weeks. Denmark also lost about a third of its territory and two-fifths of its population, and turned inward afterwards on a slogan about winning outwards what had been lost outwards. The northern part of Schleswig voted to return to Denmark in a plebiscite in 1920 and is Danish today.
- Year: 1864 CE
- Category: Military
