Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark Read Free Book Online

tantrums and fits of weeping, backed up by the threat – sometimes unspoken and sometimes explicit – to resign and return to the comfort and peace of his estate. When Bismarck wanted to consolidate his relationship with the monarch, he generally did so not by endearing himself directly to the sovereign, but by engineering crises that highlighted his own indispensability, like a helmsman whosteers into the storm in order to demonstrate his mastery of the ship.
    Bismarck appeared to stand outside the ideological prescriptions of any one interest. He was not an aristocratic corporatist; nor, on the other hand, was he, or could he be, a liberal. Nor, for all his civil service experience, did he ever identify with the ‘fourth estate’ of the bureaucrats (throughout his life he regarded the ‘pen-pushers’ (
Federfuchser
) of the administrative bureaucracy with a certain disdain). The result was a freedom from ideological constraints that made his behaviour unpredictable – one could call it realism, pragmatism or opportunism – an ability in any case to spring from one camp to the other, wrong-footing his opponents or exploiting the differences among them. Bismarck was not accountable. He could collaborate with the forces of liberalism against the conservatives (and vice versa), he could flourish the democratic franchise as a weapon against elitist liberalism, he could puncture the pretensions of the nationalists by seeming to take charge of the national cause.
    Bismarck was perfectly conscious about all of this. He disparaged theory and principle as yardsticks for political life: ‘Politics is no science, it is an art, and anyone without the knack for it should leave it alone.’ 16 ‘If I am to proceed through life on the basis of principles, it is as if I were to walk down a narrow path in the woods and had to hold a long pole in my mouth.’ Bismarck’s ability to toss away the pole when it became bothersome shocked those friends who believed they were his ideological soulmates. One of these was the conservative nobleman Ludwig von Gerlach (brother of Leopold) who fell out with Bismarck in 1857 over whether Napoleon III should be treated as a legitimate monarch despite the fact that he had been carried into power by a revolution. So Bismarck was not a man of principle; he is better described as the man of detachment from principle, the man who disconnected himself from the romantic attachments of an older generation to practise a new kind of politics, flexible, pragmatic, emancipated from fixed ideological commitments. Public emotion and public opinion were not authorities to be indulged or followed, but forces to be managed and steered.
    Bismarck’s post-romantic politics was also part of the broader transformation wrought by the revolutions of 1848. In this sense, Bismarck belongs in the company of Cavour, Field Marshal Saldanha, Pius IX and Napoleon III. The point has sometimes been made that Bismarcklearned much from the populist authoritarianism of the French Emperor, and that his governance as German chancellor after 1871 amounted to a belated German version of ‘bonapartism’. 17 However, the importance of the French model should not be overstated. Prussia itself, as we have seen, underwent a transformation in governmental practices after 1848. Like Otto von Manteuffel and the new king himself, Bismarck was a ‘man of 1848’, prepared to mix politics in new combinations. Like Manteuffel, he saw the monarchical state as the key actor in political life. It was during Manteuffel’s period in office that Bismarck acquired his shrewd ‘respect’ for public opinion, not as the arbiter of the future but as a subordinate partner to be cajoled and manipulated into cooperation. As the Prussian representative at the headquarters of the German Confederation in Frankfurt, Bismarck was entrusted with the covert channelling of government funds to friendly newspaper editors and journalists. Governmental manipulation