Room 4

THE DIPLOMAT

The Prussian king, Frederick William IV, irrevocably turned down his election as "Emperor of the Germans" on 28 April 1849. While Prussian soldiers were on their way to put down the revolution in other parts of Germany, Frederick William tried to solve the "national question" by forming an alliance of German princes. By the end of 1849, twenty-six smaller German states had joined this "Union" under Prussian leadership despite massive Austrian protests. An imperial parliament was scheduled to convene in Erfurt in 1850 to begin discussing a constitution for the Union. Under an electoral system that divided the population into three classes according to the payment of taxes (Dreiklassenwahlrecht), Bismarck took his seat in the lower house of the imperial parliament as a representative of the constituency of Rathenow in Brandenburg. His main criticism of the constitution was that Prussia could forfeit its dominance in a federative state. As he put it, "We are Prussians, and we want to remain Prussians." Bismarck expressed this political credo symbolically as well by removing the black, red, and gold ornamentation on the seats of the Prussian conservatives and replacing it with ribbons in the Prussian colors of white and black.

Although a majority of the Erfurt parliament voted for the Union constitution, the Prussian government delayed its realization of the union. It was influenced by the vehement criticism heard from the ultraconservatives and, above all, by the fact that the "parliamentary" constitution was rejected outright by Czar Nicholas, who saw it as a revolutionary threat. Meanwhile, the Austrian government headed by Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg worked to revive the Diet of the German Confederation, which met on 2 September 1850 for the hrst time since 12 July 1848. Prussia considered the restoration of the Confederation inadmissible because the majority of the German states had not agreed to it. Prussia was also annoyed by the Danish king's petition in Frankfurt to have the Confederation intervene to put down the "Holstein rebels."

The constitutional conflict between the estates in the Electorate of Hesse and Elector Frederick William II put Prussia in an explosive political situation when, on 17 September 1850, the electoral government of Hesse appealed to the German Confederation to intervene there as well. On 1 November 1850, troops of the Confederation marched into the Electorate of Hesse. Because Prussia believed it necessary to protect her own power by opposing Austria, she suddenly found herself supporting the population of Hesse against its ruler. Czar Nicholas disapproved of the action in the strongest terms, a rebuke that led to the dismissal of the Prussian foreign minister, Joseph Maria von Radowitz, on 2 November. The new prime minister, Otto von Manteuffel, who also took over as the head of the foreign ministry, attempted to avoid the threat of war and tried to come to terms with Austria. On 29 November 1850, Manteuffel and Schwarzenberg signed a convention, the Punktation of Olmütz, in which Prussia terminated her intervention in the Electorate of Hesse and abandoned her Union project. The end of Prussia's Union policy was sealed.

This admission of having been defeated by Austria set off a wave of protest in power-conscious Prussia. In the second chamber, the Prussian House of Deputies, the liberals filed a motion of no-confidence against the government, and even the conservatives found it hard to justify what became known as the "humiliation of Olmütz." But Bismarck defended the government. In his famous Olmütz speech of 3 December 1850, he stated that a joint policy of "Germany's equal protecting powers" was better for "Prussian honor" than a "shameful link with democracy."

On 15 July 1851, Frederick William IV appointed Bismarck as Prussia's delegate to the Diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt. Bismarck worked ardently for parity between the two great powers in the Confederation and attempted to reduce Austria's presidential function to a merely honorary one. As he soon recognized, that was a project quite apt to conflict with Austria's political interests. Schwarzenberg, Bismarck's counterpart, resolutely pursued the plan of tying the German Confederation closely to Austria, thereby strengthening the Habsburg monarchy on the matter of the national insurrections in the Balkans and Upper Italy. This concept consigned Prussia to a secondary role only.

Austria and Prussia concurred about the preservation of conservative principles. On 23 August 1851 the Diet of the German Confederation followed in the tradition of the settlements of 1832 and exercised its right to review "state institutions" and "laws and regulations" of the individual member states for their compatibility with the laws of the Confederation. On the same day, the Diet repealed the basic rights that had been enacted as imperial law by the imperial vicar on 27 December 1848. Bismarck, too, signed this resolution. Nonetheless, there was a serious clash with the Austrian envoy, Count von Thun-Hohenstein, whom Bismarck characterized as an "example of peasant diplomacy," over the issue of procuring funds for the German fleet. To cover the current costs for ships and crews, the Austrians petitioned on 8 July 1851 to have the Diet request additional proportionate levies from the member states. Manteuffel directed Bismarck to withhold consent until outstanding proportionate levies for the fleet had been paid by dilatory members, especially Austria. Ignoring Prussian opposition, the Diet nevertheless decided to take out a loan from Rothschild, the banker of the German Confederation. Bismarck lodged a sharp, but futile, protest with the representative of the presiding power. In Prussia's view the resolution was invalid because the fleet was not an institution of the Confederation, as were, for example, the fortresses it maintained. Resolutions pertaining to the fleet therefore had to be passed unanimously. All attempts to rescue the fleet failed, and it was eventually disbanded in the spring of 1852.

The fortresses maintained by the Confederation were considered to be highly important for the defense of German territory. Because war with France was believed to be the main threat, the locations of the fortresses stretching southwards from Luxembourg through Mainz, Landau, and Rastatt down to Ulm were designed to defend against attack from the west, and these installations were constantly being expanded. Accordingly, Austria also tried to assert her dominant position in the military commission of the German Confederation, too, action that was bound to create friction with Prussia. After repeated Austrian neglect to consult Prussia on petitions to expand and improve the fortresses of Rastatt and Ulm, Bismarck wrote a letter to Leopold von Gerlach in which he described Austria's handling of the fortress issue as "malicious" and "clumsy. " In his opinion, harmony between Prussia and Austria was more important for the security of Germany than further expansion of the fortresses.

Adroitly temporizing, Prussia succeeded in thwarting the Austrian attempt to assume the leading role in the customs and trade policy in Germany. With help from Bavaria and Württemberg, the Austrian trade minister, Baron Karl Ludwig von Bruck, wanted to destroy the Customs Union (Zollverein) formed by Prussia in 1834 and replace it with an Austro-German customs federation. In a report to Manteuffel dated 9 October 1851, Bismarck judged the Austrian policy as "natural" and predicted "that Austria will concentrate all her energy and persistence on the indicated trade policy for the time being." Schwarzenberg's death changed nothing in the Austrian position, as Bismarck noted in conjunction with a diplomatic mission in Vienna in June 1852. Not until Napoleon III ascended the throne in December did the government in Vienna yield on the tariff issue. Given Napoleon's anti-Austrian policies in Italy, the Bruck Plan for an Austro-German customs federation was temporarily dropped, and an Austrian-Prussian trade treaty was concluded on 19 January 1853.

During his time as delegate to the Diet of the German Confederation, Bismarck was especially interested in the question of power relationships in Europe and commented on it in many letters and official memoranda. Clearly, Bismarck was increasingly moving away from Austria. He warned against tying the "trim and seaworthy frigate" of Prussia to the "worm-eaten, old battleship of Austria." Having concluded a defensive and offensive alliance between Austria, Prussia, and the German Confederation in 1854, the government in Vienna tried to safeguard its policy vis-a-vis Russia in the Crimean War. Bismarck scored his first great diplomatic success in 1855 in parrying Austrian attempts to draw the German Confederation into the war against Russia. In the committees, he was able to form a majority against the Austrian petition of 14 January 1855 to mobilize the troops of the Confederation. To save face and avoid defeat over the issue, Austria, hitherto the dominant power in the Confederation, was obliged to withdraw her request for mobilization.

When Bismarck was recalled from Frankfurt in 1859, he regarded the German Confederation as "Prussia's malady." As early as 1858 he took a decisive stand on German policy in a memorandum that detractors called "Herr von Bismarck's little book." He commented on the German question during his tenure as Prussian minister to St. Petersburg as well (1859- 62). The war that pitted Austria against France and Italy in 1859, fought over the future of the Apennine peninsula, prompted Bismarck to consider a more offensive policy for Prussia. In a letter to Gustav von Alvensleben in May 1859, Bismarck advised that the Prussian army march south, "taking the frontier posts along in the knapsacks and driving them into the ground again at Lake Constance or where Protestantism ceases to predominate." In retrospect, Bismarck described as "fruitless" his attempts to influence policy in Berlin with dispatches while serving as minister to St. Petersburg, for they reached the sovereign only in distorted form, if at all. On the other hand, however, it is undisputed that in St. Petersburg he came into contact with such influential politicians as the Russian foreign minister, Gorchakov. The knowledge that Bismarck gained there about Russia's political and social currents became an important element in his later foreign policy.

Heidemarie Anderlik