Even more shockingly for conservatives, Bismarck now created a new union of twenty-two German states, naming it the North German Confederation. This was halfway to being a German nation state, with a parliament, the Reichstag, which, astonishingly, was elected by universal male suffrage, in contrast to the property qualifications that governed voting rights in Prussia itself. Here Bismarck was taking a leaf from Napoleon III’s book, bypassing the liberal middle classes to appeal to what he assumed were the loyal and conservative masses in the countryside. Bismarck made sure that the
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