The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

This meant it would have to be led by Prussia. The problem was that Prussia was not a liberal state. In almost a decade of power the leading minister, Otto von Manteuffel (1805–82), had modernized the public administration and deregulated the economy, but he had also promoted the police as a positive, formative influence in society, and protected the central place of the professional army in the state.

So the Progressives exercised one of the few real powers of the legislature, the right to approve the state budget, and voted it down. Without parliamentary approval it would be illegal to collect taxes or spend money on keeping the government and administration going. And they were not prepared to grant it until they won the argument over the replacement of the army by a militia. In this stalemate Wilhelm I turned to the toughest and most conservative politician he knew: Otto von Bismarck.

While the core areas of the old Prussian state, East and West Prussia, lay outside the German Confederation, the newest part of the Kingdom, Rhineland-Westphalia, added by the Congress of Vienna, was separated from the rest of Prussia by the Kingdom of Hanover. These western areas were by the middle of the century proving to be a huge advantage to Prussia: traditionally a centre of manufacture and commerce, they were now undergoing rapid industrialization on a large scale.

The Kingdom of Hanover had been ruled by the kings of Britain until 1837, but fortuitously the accession of Queen Victoria, who as a woman was debarred from becoming a German monarch by the Salic Law, effectively severed Hanover’s ties with the world’s leading commercial and naval power. Bismarck thus saw the opportunity to join up the different bits of Prussia into a single state. The key, Bismarck realized, lay in engineering the destruction of the German Confederation.

The question, which had already come to the fore in 1848, boiled up again in 1863, when King Frederik VII of Denmark died without an heir. Since the rules allowed succession through the female line in Denmark but not, because of the Salic Law, in the German Confederation, to which the duchies belonged, the new king, Christian IX, who did indeed inherit through the female line, could not become Duke of Schleswig and Holstein, which would have to come under a relative who inherited through the male line.

When the Prussians advanced deep into Denmark itself, the Danes caved in. On 30 October they were forced to abandon both Duchies, which were now ruled respectively by Austria and Prussia; Denmark lost about a quarter of its population, including 200,000 Danish-speakers, in the process.

Bismarck’s next step, however, was more controversial. The war against Denmark had introduced yet another geopolitical anomaly into north Germany in the form of Austria’s administration of the southern Duchy of Holstein, agreed with Prussia in the Gastein Convention of 1865. It was in Prussia’s interest to incorporate it into its own territory along with Schleswig, and Bismarck saw in the continuing disputes between the two states over the administration of the Duchies the opportunity for launching a war against Austria that would finally lead to the expulsion of the Habsburgs from Germany.

Most observers predicted a victory for the Austrian-led Confederation.

He believed in swift and decisive aggression as the best way to win a war, and broke up the massed Prussian infantry columns into smaller, more mobile and tactically responsive units, leaving much of the initiative in their deployment to their individual commanders, to the derision of many military commentators. By contrast, Austrian military doctrine regarded an emphasis on attack as a mistaken principle that had led the first Napoleon to disaster, and put its faith in a defensive strategy based on military strongpoints and fortresses.

The bulwark of imperial power in 1848 and again through the neo-absolutist 1850s, the Austrian Army was lavishly rewarded with funds, but spent them on luxuries, uniforms, and extra, largely useless administrative posts rather than on modernizing its armaments and equipment. Many of the ordinary soldiers were poorly educated, badly prepared, weedy and stunted, unlike their Prussian counterparts.

The Prussians lost 9,000 men in the fighting, killed, wounded, captured or missing, whereas the Habsburg army’s losses totalled over 40,000, more than half of them taken prisoner. The Austrians and their allies had no more forces to counter the Prussian attack. Moltke occupied Prague and advanced on Vienna. In a short time his requisitioning columns reduced Lower Austria north of the Danube to ‘a vast desert’. His morale broken, Franz Joseph sued for peace.

Demonstrating his ruthless disrespect for tradition and legitimacy, Bismarck ousted the King of Hanover and turned his kingdom into a Prussian province, thus bridging the gap between the two halves of the Prussian state. For good measure Bismarck also grabbed other German territories, notably the previously self-governing city of Frankfurt, Germany’s financial centre, which like Hanover had backed the wrong side in the war.

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 Reichstag’s powers were limited;

The events of 1866 had major repercussions in the rest of Europe. After their defeat by Prussia, the Austrians realized they could not continue to fight the Italians, despite the victory of Custoza, and capitulated, leaving the peace settlement to cede the rest of northern Italy to the Italian state – an outcome which led to the jibe of a Russian diplomat at a peace conference later in the century, that since the Italians were demanding more territory, he supposed they must have lost another battle.

But France stood in the way. Following the Prussian victory, Napoleon III began to search for ways of limiting the threat to France that he saw in the emergence of a new strong power on the right bank of the Rhine. But he was unable to find any allies to back him up; the Italians were irritated by the continuing French military defence of the Pope’s remaining territories in and around Rome, Britain stood aloof, and Russia still valued the Prussians’ role in Poland. Nevertheless, war fever began to grip the French political elite.

What were the reasons for Bismarck’s aggressive and underhand behaviour? First, the ousting of the pro-Prussian Ministry in Bavaria in February 1870 and its replacement by a government of the ‘Patriot Party’, Catholic, anti-Prussian, and pro-French, threatened to derail the progress of unification. Bismarck feared this development could well be repeated in other south German states. Secondly, military reforms in France, though incomplete, meant that in the near future French military strength would be even more formidable than it already was. Thirdly, the French, currently on their own, might also gain allies in the near future; indeed, Napoleon III gambled on the Austrians and the Danes choosing this moment to take their revenge. Fourthly, it seemed to Bismarck that at this point Napoleon III could easily be made to appear the aggressor and thus international intervention be avoided.

While Moltke allowed his officers wide latitude in taking tactical decisions, however, the rigid French chain of command bound Napoleon’s officers into slow-moving, largely defensive manoeuvres. The chain of command through the Prussian General Staff – the only General Staff in Europe at the time – was far more decisive and effective. By the time of the first encounters, the French had brought 250,000 men to the front, many of them inadequately armed and supplied, whereas the Prussians and their allies deployed 320,000 battle-ready troops on the border.

These initial victories opened the way for the Prussians to advance across France; they came as an enormous shock to public opinion across Europe, dissuading the Austrians, Danes and Italians from intervening, causing the overthrow of the French government, and leading to increasingly vehement criticism of the emperor by Republican journalists and politicians.

Altogether in the war, the French lost 140,000 killed and roughly the same number wounded, the Germans 45,000 killed and twice as many wounded. The peace terms imposed by Bismarck aroused lasting resentments that were to find their eventual outlet in 1914. To add insult to injury, Bismarck organized the proclamation of the German Empire, extended to include the now helpless south German states as well, in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, on 18 January 1871.

Gambling on the loyalty and conservatism of the rural masses, bold and imaginative statesmen like Napoleon III, Bismarck and Disraeli had sought to outflank the liberals and deliver mass support to their new conservative ideology. Reaction, rampant almost everywhere in 1850, had failed by the end of the decade, even in Russia, despite its attempts to adapt to the new circumstances of the post-revolutionary era. The Vienna Settlement had been torn up, Metternich’s immobile conservatism brushed aside, and a new political order born.

Even the most reactionary regimes of the 1850s recognized the need for economic deregulation, educational improvement and judicial reform, all of which can be counted major results of the 1848 Revolutions. The relations of governments with the public everywhere, even in Russia, were no longer shrouded in secrecy and mystery or dependent on assumed habits of deference, but were based far more on an openly propagandistic appeal to the loyalty of the masses.

Seen in a global context, the most notable achievement of the 1848 Revolutions was the abolition of slavery in a number of Europe’s overseas colonies. Here, as in many other respects, the running was made by the British, who had already abolished slavery in their colonies in the 1830s and used the power of the Royal Navy to suppress the trade in slaves from Africa to the New World.

The Spanish colony of Cuba did not outlaw the slave trade until 1867 and slavery itself in 1886, while it took the French another decade to abolish slavery in Madagascar.

Feminism was in the end marginal to the ideas and events of the 1848 Revolutions. So too, in the larger scheme of things, was socialism. At the beginning of the revolutionary year the socialists were in disarray, many of them in exile, without any mass following.

From now on, there was to be a clear distinction on the far left between the socialists, mostly followers of Marx, who eschewed the bullet for the ballot box, trusting in the inexorable growth of the proletariat to deliver, in the end, a democratic majority for a peaceful revolution, and the anarchists, mostly followers of Bakunin, who relied on violence, assassination and insurrection to destroy the state and open the way for the naturally egalitarian instincts of the rural masses to express themselves.

The Baltic German nobility in Estonia still owned 58 per cent of the total land surface of the province in 1914.

Hermynia fell ill with tuberculosis and had to spend many months recuperating at a sanatorium in Davos in Switzerland, where she was still staying in 1914 when the war broke out. She did not return. The Russian Revolution allowed her to obtain a divorce. By 1919 she was in Germany, where she joined the Communist Party and earned her living by translating more than 150 novels from French and English into German, including the entire output of the American writer Upton Sinclair.

In 1933, when the Nazis took over, she left, after publishing a letter condemning the new regime, and eventually made her way to England, where in 1951 she died in poverty and obscurity in Radlett, Hertfordshire, her works entirely forgotten. Viktor, meanwhile, organized an anti-Bolshevik militia after the 1917 revolution, joined the Nazi stormtroopers in the 1930s, and died in 1950, shortly before his ex-wife.

The power of the ‘landed interest’ in British politics was weakened steadily by extensions of the franchise, in 1832, 1867 and 1884, and by the ongoing processes of industrialization and urbanization.

Secret ballots were introduced by law in England in 1872, and most European countries thereafter (they had existed in France since the 1790s). In Germany it became steadily more difficult to apply coercion and intimidation as the ballot became more secret:

More important still in the decline of aristocratic power was the growing might of the state, which over the course of the century abrogated noble rights of self-governance in feudal corporations, and replaced the ties of feudal dominance over the bodies of serfs and subjects with basic freedoms of movement, labour and inheritance, and equality before the law. Increased taxation and other burdens devised by the centralized apparatus of government further impinged on the autonomy of noble estate-owners.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the economy of Europe and indeed the entire world was dominated by Britain. By 1850 over 40 per cent of the world’s output of traded manufactured goods was produced in the United Kingdom.

Britain’s domination of the oceans in the decades following the defeat of Napoleon ensured that British shipping carried the vast bulk of world trade during the period. At mid-century a quarter of all international trade passed through British ports. More than half of Britain’s foreign trade was carried in British ships, generating important invisible earnings that were enormously boosted by the virtual world monopoly in shipping insurance exercised by Lloyd’s of London. In 1890, Britain still had a greater tonnage of shipping than the rest of the world put together. Even in 1910, 40 per cent of the tonnage of the ships engaged in world trade was British.

Compared to Germany’s rapid industrial growth, French industrialization was an oft-interrupted process through most of the nineteenth century. British superiority in heavy industry, manufacturing and engineering in the first half of the century meant that the French had to concentrate on consumer goods, notably textiles.

Population growth in France was far slower than in Britain or Germany, leaving little room for growth-led demand and placing a greater weight on exports. In addition, French agriculture was notably inefficient, with wheat yields in 1911–12 averaging half those of Belgium or the Netherlands.

Overall, the epidemic cost around 37 per cent of the average annual French gross domestic product in the years 1885–1894, an indication of how important winegrowing was to the economy.

In 1913, despite its huge size and massive population, the Russian Empire produced only one-tenth of the coal mined in Britain, half the British output of steel, and one-third of the oil brought to the surface in the USA.

British dependence on what by the late nineteenth century had become traditional industries also inhibited the development of new ones, but also slowed modernization more generally. Continental industries had the advantage of coming late to the game and being able to adopt the latest methods, while British industries began to lag behind.

In two industries in particular the British fell behind their competitors in the second half of the nineteenth century. Germany took the lead in the chemical industry, where German research dominated to such an extent that British chemists almost invariably went there to get their training.

Like the chemical industry, the electrical industry, the other field in which Germany took the lead in the late nineteenth century, also developed through international collaboration. Here too the British failed to innovate.

By this time the German chemical and electrical industries had grown to become European and indeed world leaders, leaving their British counterparts far behind. Part of the reason was their employment of trained scientists – 230 in BASF, for example, or 165 in Hoechst, another major chemical firm – reflecting the greater concentration of state-funded German universities on the sciences.

It was not only the German economy that was outpacing the British in the ‘second industrial revolution’, or at least in parts of it. In Italy the development of an advanced electrical industry in the 1890s delivered a sharp stimulus to modern areas of production, notably motor manufacture.

In this way Italy, Sweden and Norway all leapfrogged the coal-based stages of industrialization and entered the industrial age on the basis of the most modern power technology. Other countries, such as Austria, despite its Alpine potential, found it difficult to follow suit, not least because of the inhibiting effect of the German economy: thus, for example, while German chemical companies could obtain sulphuric acid as a cheap by-product of the metallurgical industries, Austria, lacking modern industries of this kind, had to import it in the old-fashioned form of Spanish pyrites, at a much higher cost.

British universities began to adopt the focus on centrally directed research that characterized German higher education, with Cambridge creating strong faculties separate from the colleges, whereas Oxford refused to take this step, preferring instead to continue focusing on the education of young men for public service.

Berlin’s population grew from 172,000 in 1800 to 419,000 at mid-century, 1,122,000 by 1880, and more than two million thirty years later, on the eve of the First World War. The population of Copenhagen increased from just over 100,000 in 1800 to more than half a million in 1910. After Buda and Pest, facing each other across the Danube, were formally united in 1873, the population of the Hungarian capital grew from 270,000 to 880,000 by the First World War. Lisbon’s population, more or less static for most of the nineteenth century, suddenly shot up from 242,000 in 1880 to 435,000 thirty years later.

Another plumber, Thomas Crapper (1836–1910), often credited with the invention of the flush toilet, was in fact responsible only for the development of the ballcock.

London’s new system of sewers, constructed by the civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91) between 1858 (immediately after the ‘Great Stink’, caused by noxious effluvia from the Thames, had closed down Parliament for several days) and 1865, was a great source of civic pride: the opening of the southern outfall down the Thames was attended by 500 guests, who dined on salmon as the effluvia of the great city rushed through the tunnel beneath them and fell into the river below.

So capacious was the main sewer constructed underneath the city that journeys along it in what was described as ‘a veritable gondola with carpeted floor and cushioned seats, lit up by large lamps’ were offered to adventurous tourists. ‘No foreigner of distinction’, noted the Larousse dictionary proudly in 1870, ‘wants to leave the city without making this singular trip’, and female tourists were as welcome as male: ‘The presence of lovely women,’ commented an American tourist, ‘can add a charm to the sewer.’ The Paris sewers even appealed to the literary-minded, who could thrill to the thought that they were reliving the experiences of the hero of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Jean Valjean.

The world’s second-oldest underground railway was a funicular system built in Istanbul by a British company and opened in 1875, and the third, in Glasgow, a cable railway inaugurated in 1896. The Budapest Underground, using overhead wires, also opened in 1896. Paris followed suit with the Métro, whose first line began operating in 1900.

The headlong growth of industry brought with it a rapid transformation of urban society, creating what was in many ways essentially a new social class: the bourgeoisie. The name itself – bourgeois, Bürger, borghese – meant city-dweller.