In a recent issue of Central European History, David Wetzel published a wide-ranging review of the first two volumes of my documentary edition on the Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne, the immediate pre-history of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71.Footnote ¹ It goes without saying that I read this review by the author of A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III, and the Origins of the Franco-Prussian War (2001) with particular interest. My first—and lasting—impression is that here was the discussion of a specialist, one that—precisely because of Wetzel's roots in a different historiographical tradition—represents a model of scholarly fairness. In German historiography since the nineteenth century, and primarily for political reasons, comparably fair treatment of works that deal with a central historical figure such as Bismarck has not been the rule. I am no less grateful for the opportunity offered by his critical objections to make some more general and precise points.

Wetzel's principal reservations about my interpretation of the Reich-founder's policies focus above all on the question whether the war of 1870/71 was an intended preventive war. In what follows, I will address this issue more closely, after dealing with two other problems in Wetzel's argumentation.

Wetzel considers a longer period of peace after 1866 to have been indispensably in Prussia's interests, in order to assimilate its enormous annexations (equivalent in size to approximately one third of Prussia's territory within the former German Confederation) and to consolidate definitively the North German Confederation. This does not accord with my impressions of the expectations of contemporaries, the dynamics of Prussian expansionist policies after the caesura of Bismarck's appointment in 1862, or the exigencies of kleindeutsch national policy. It was a common conviction in Berlin diplomacy that “en politique, qui n'avance pas, recule, and for us this is doubly true.”Footnote ² Bismarck himself explained to the Saxon minister Baron Richard von Friesen in March 1870 that “for the North German Confederation a war with France is likewise not only unavoidable, but also necessary; for so long as the current, uncertain state of affairs vis-à-vis France prevails, developing and securing salutary relationships at home is out of the question as well” (no. 231). À propos an account by Prussia's interior minister, Count Friedrich von Eulenburg in 1871, the British military attaché in Berlin interpreted the deliberations in Bismarck's closest circle thus: “The state of tension arising from the relations with France was intolerable to the country. Trade was almost at a standstill. At any rate its development was hindered, and at every moment the thought arose, if we do so or so we shall have war with France. It was best to put a stop to this state of things” (no. 834). All the authors of substantial biographies of Bismarck published in the second half of the twentieth century agreed that the “answer to the much discussed question, whether it might have in principle been possible for Bismarck to have remained with what had been attained [in 1866] for a longer period of time … is quite clear: no.”Footnote ³ For example, the old imperial city of Frankfurt was furiosamente antiprusiano well into the July crisis of 1870—not least because of its memory of Berlin's harsh military rule after the Prussian conquest of 1866. In the annexed kingdom of Hanover, a great part of the population remained fidelísimo attached to their Guelf dynasty, dethroned in 1866, equally long. Yet Frankfurt as well as Hanover counted, according to reports of the Spanish envoy in Berlin, among the first of those whose male population rushed to arms under the impact of the “Ems Dispatch” (no. 881). Given the enduring memories of the Napoleonic wars, the nationalizing impact of a struggle against the French “hereditary enemy” and the integrative effect of common victories on the battlefield were known to all; Bismarck could count on them. It is no accident that not January 18, the anniversary of the emperor's proclamation, but September 2, the anniversary of the Battle of Sedan and victory over Napoleon III, became the actual national holiday for Bismarck's empire.

Likewise, I cannot accept the premise of Wetzel's second objection, that in the event of a war Bismarck would have had to reckon with the emergence of competition from rivals. After a successful war, his position would have been unassailable—as it was after 1871; after a lost war, he would have sought death on the battlefield in keeping with the archaic norms of the military aristocracy: “If we are beaten … ,” he said in 1866, “I shall fall in the last charge.”Footnote ⁴

To proceed to the main question: must the Hohenzollern candidacy be understood as a “trap for Badinguet”Footnote ⁵ in the European contest with France (and Austria-Hungary) over “supremacy” in Germany and primacy on the continent? Wetzel's answer is a clear “no:” “Throughout his life Bismarck's was a weighty and impressive voice against the concept of preventive war …” (pp. 609ff). For support, Wetzel notes, as “the most outstanding, but by no means only example,” Bismarck's dispatch of February 26, 1869, to Prussia's representative in Munich, Georg von Werthern (no. 63). If one considers the pre-history of this dispatch and its actual addressee—the Bavarian government, then I think it is hard to invoke this document as crown witness. Werthern numbered among those members of the pro-Prussian leadership stratum who considered it a mistake after Königgrätz for Bismarck not to have immediately resolved the German question by a war with France. At the turn of 1866/67, he proposed (as Prussia's former representative in Madrid) that King William decorate General Ramon Maria Narváez, Spain's veteran conservative prime minister with the ulterior motive of winning sympathy in the Spanish army for a coming Prussian war against France. Bismarck had called Werthern on the carpet for going around the normal chain of command, with a massive threat that he would, if need be, inform the king that he “could not serve as minister in the same government with an envoy of His Majesty who repeatedly took such routes” (no. 2). Bismarck thus already had every reason to warn the busybody diplomat to abstain from extracurricular activities in Bavaria and to remind him of the ostensible baselines of his policy with regard to the German question. And those naturally consisted of assurances of goodwill toward the Wittelsbach kingdom, which represented the highly precarious linchpin of his larger German policy; of awaiting further developments in the southern states, since 1866; and refraining from exerting any political pressure on Munich, the Kingdom of Württemberg, or the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Darmstadt. What other interpretation of his policy could he have had his envoy represent to the Bavarians given the strength of the dynasty's particularist traditions and the political preferences of its agrarian, Catholic majority—if he was aiming, as Wetzel writes, at a peaceful consummation of Prussia's expansionist national policy after 1866, or if he wanted at least to create the appearance of such an evolutionary policy? In 1868 the majority of those eligible to vote in Bavaria (like the majority of voters in all the southern states except Baden) returned anti-Prussian delegates, opposed to joining the North German Confederation, to Berlin's Zollparlament. With that the optimistic calculation of the National Liberals, that the Zollparlament with its limited powers would quickly develop into a quasi-national “full parliament,” was proven illusionary. The pro-Prussian minister president in Munich, after a long domestic crisis in the spring of 1870, was forced, in the face of the anti-Prussian opposition, to throw in the towel and resign. And at the summit of Bavarian policy stood Ludwig II, a sick king, touchily protective of his royal prerogative and Bavaria's autonomy. In autumn 1870 Bismarck was able to enlist him for an initiative to confer the imperial crown on the Prussian king only by promising what amounted to a large bribe, for the construction of Ludwig's expensive Bavarian palaces.

Thus the only thing that can be deduced from the February 26, 1869, dispatch to Werthern, in my view, is how Prussian policy in Munich was to be represented diplomatically and to the public, not what principles actually defined Bismarck's German policy. This becomes even clearer when one considers that the Chancellor's letter came in response to a confidential report by Werthern from February 23, 1869, about a political conversation with the Duke of Coburg and the two Princes von Langenburg and von Leiningen. In this dispatch, the envoy had informed the chancellor that he agreed with these members of the higher nobility “that without violent action by Prussia, German unity would never be achieved” and that he, too, was of the view that “the Germans would still need to seek their fortune se defendendo (in self-defense).”Footnote ⁶ Bismarck responded with a famous reposte, much cited especially after the outbreak of the controversy over the “war guilt lie” of the Versailles Treaty: “We can put the clocks forward, but time does not on that account move any faster, and the ability to wait while the situation develops is a prerequisite of practical politics.” This formulation, which smacks of political quietism, can be traced to the chancellor of the North German Confederation. The original version in the foreign office's draft, however, had referred to “the ability to wait, until the moment arrives for prompt action.” It is obvious that Bismarck's “quietist” formulation was better suited to producing the desired sedative effect on the fundamental distrust of Prussia in Bavaria, and southern Germany generally, than the foreign office's. The latter had explicitly reserved for the chancellor the sudden and surprising initiative, however, should the “opportune” occasion arise.Footnote ⁷ The window of opportunity for the “moment of prompt action” finally opened at the end of February 1870, with Madrid's offer of the throne. That created the opportunity, given appropriate secrecy, to put the “clock of development at the right hour” by provoking diplomatic conflict with the French “hereditary enemy” in self-defense—“se defendendo”:—thus went Bismarck's activist version of the much cited (in its quietist exegesis) “clock paradigm,” from a programmatic letter of 1856.

If the dispatch to Werthern does not support the contention that Bismarck maintained a lifelong, categorical rejection of a preventive war, what then was the Prussian statesman's position, in principle, on prophylactically unleashing an armed conflict? Wetzel cites, as one of many pieces of evidence for his conviction, a memorandum written by the chancellor shortly after the “war-in-sight-crisis” of 1875 (p. 610). The memo reads, “I would … never advise Your Majesty to wage a war immediately on account of its being probable that the enemy would soon start it; one can never ascertain the ways of Divine Providence in advance with enough certainty for such action” (emphasis mine).Footnote ⁸ Karl-Ernst Jeismann's still fundamental monograph on preventive war comes to the conclusion that “When Bismarck rejected preventive war, he always spoke only about the probability of an imminent war that one's opponent, one believed or assumed, would soon begin better armed. Whenever, however, he approved the idea of preventive war, he always presupposed that one could with certainty consider the war to be unavoidable.”Footnote ⁹

But above and beyond this: in 1866 the Prussian monarch had acceded to Bismarck's course headed toward a war of secession against the German Confederation and its Austrian hegemon only with grave misgivings. In the immediate pre-history of the war with France—with regard to the Hohenzollern candidacy—William was, next to Queen Augusta, the greatest obstacle that Bismarck had to surmount. In 1875, William I was seventy-eight years old. Can we be surprised at the Chancellor's argumentation to the Kaiser in the memo Wetzel cites, in the face of a looming fourth war that could have jeopardized not only the extraordinary territorial gains of 1866 but also the founding of the empire?Footnote ¹⁰

To ask this is not to deny that Bismarck was occasionally beset by religious or humanitarian scruples. “Without me,” the Reich-founder once remarked in old age, “three great wars would not have taken place; 80,000 men would not have died; and parents, brothers, sisters, and widows not have mourned. That, however, I have settled with God.” In all decisive cases, such scruples were overruled by Bismarck's realpolitical will to power and the raison d'état of a military monarchy, within whose Frederickian traditions the Reich-founder placed himself. In that, historians with very different points of departure are in essential agreement.Footnote ¹¹

To summarize my position grounded in the document collection:

1. 1 The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 bore the characteristic features of a “provoked defensive war.” The Hohenzollern candidacy collided with the predictable French determination to counter Bismarck's challenge and with the French war party's vital interest in exacting “revanche pour Sadowa” (Königgrätz) in order to revise the geopolitical outcome of 1866.

2. 2 The Franco-Prussian War was not a preventive war, understood to mean that Prussia pre-empted an imminent French attack. In view of Napoleon III's illness, one need reckon with no immediate danger of war from his side in the spring of 1870, as long as Berlin respected the Main River boundary. The appointment of the Duke of Gramont, a spokesman for the French war party, to Foreign Minister on May 13, however, could only be viewed as a weighty indication of the increasing rigidity of French foreign policy toward the German question and therefore as raising the threat of war, at least for the near future. If one extends the term “preventive war” in this sense, then one can indeed describe the war of 1870 as a prophylactic military confrontation. One of Bismarck's closest colleagues during the 1870s, the later ambassador Josef Maria von Radowitz, described this possibility in retrospect, using the model of a preventive “provoked defensive war” thusly:

It must be kept in mind, however, that Bismarck had examined the possibility of a “Spanish diversion” aimed at France (and thereby the continuation of Prussia's expansionist policy, the completion of its kleindeutsch national policy, and a decision on European predominance) already in principle in the spring of 1869, and that he initiated such a policy two months before Gramont's appointment (see nos. 143–312). If there is a plausible alternative explanation for Bismarck's extraordinary dynamism in the first months of 1870, I have not heard of it.

In light of the difficulties involved in formulating a rigorous definition of the term “preventive war,” I deliberately chose the narrower and more precise concept of a “provoked defensive war” for the conflict of 1870/71. Let's see how this concept works by looking at Bismarck's “diversionary dispatch” of March 9, 1869.

It was on this date that Bismarck definitively formulated a dispatch to the North German Confederation's envoy in St. Petersburg that fundamentally set the course for his foreign policy after the September 1868 revolution in Spain. In the background lay Franco-Russian tensions bubbling up around the Eastern Question and rumors of plans for an anti-Prussian triple alliance (France, Italy, and Austria-Hungary) to avenge Königgrätz. Bismarck underlined in the March 9 document his “conviction” that, in the event of a Russian military conflict with France, Prussia could “not leave” the tsarist empire “in the lurch.” Berlin could and would induce a military intervention (unpopular though it would be with the German public) on Russia's side, but in such a way that the intervention would not have “the appearance of an aggressive cabinet war.” “We would”—these were Bismarck's words—“seek to bring about our participation on Russia's side through deportment and actions that would compel France to attack or threaten Germany.” In addition, Prussia could use “troop deployments, national demonstrations in Germany and Italy, as well as our relations to Belgium and even to Spain” as “diversions” that “would force” France “to attack or threaten Germany,” without exposing Prussia to the odium attaching to an aggressor.Footnote ¹⁴

This “diversionary dispatch” was, to go straight to the bottom line, a general blueprint for a “provoked defensive war,”Footnote ¹⁵ like the one that broke out once the candidacy of a Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen prince for the Spanish throne became known during the Franco-Prussian July crisis of 1870. Of course in the context of the national wars of the nineteenth century, the “provoked defensive war” was no special invention of Bismarck's. The same strategy of camouflaged offensive initiated Italy's national unification: with Napoleon III's backing, Cavour steered a confrontational course with Austria that, given the rules of the game governing Europe's antagonistic state system, left Vienna with no alternative but to declare war on Piedmont. For Bismarck as for other statesmen whose political religion was “reason of state” (and they made up the great majority), it was a classic truism of post-Machiavellian statecraft that the start of an offensive campaign, in an age of the nation-state, had to be organized as a defensive war.

Maintaining the appearance of a defensive war was all the more important for Bismarck because, after the 1868 elections to the Zollparlament at the latest, he could no longer count on a majority of south Germans to support accession to the North German Confederation. And in light of the stance of all the South German governments, except Baden's, it had also become clear that the automatic functioning of the military alliances concluded in 1866 with the states of south Germany could be relied upon only in the case of an (ostensibly) defensive war. The course of the July 1870 crisis provided double proof.

For one thing, Prince Karl Anton's withdrawal of his son's candidacy in Madrid on July 12, 1870, following international pressure and the correspondingly urgent request of the Prussian king, rendered factually baseless the reproach to the Hohenzollern that they were ruthlessly pursuing family and purely Prussian prestige interests. And Karl Anton's capitulation freed Bismarck's collision course at least partially from the reasonable suspicion that he was blatantly disturbing international peace. In the lapidary judgment of Werthern, the Prussian envoy in Munich on July 20, “The most skillful move in the chess game so far was the immediate withdrawal of the Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne. Without it, South Germany would have been lost …” (no. 881*).Footnote ¹⁶ The Sigmaringen relinquished their dynastic ambitions in Madrid without Bismarck's knowledge and against his will following the confrontation with Paris. When he finally returned to Berlin from his estate at Varzin on July 12, he exclaimed, according to a minute written by his son Herbert in spring 1871, “Not long ago I thought I stood on the eve of the greatest historical event, and now I daresay all I will have is merely the annoyance of having my summer cure suddenly interrupted.” Alluding to Leopold's retreat into vacation-land, Bismarck concluded, “If the prince had any starch at all, we would have had to go looking for him [during the July crisis] in the Pyrenees instead of the Bavarian Alps” (no. 835*).

Secondly, Bismarck won the definite military support of South Germany when he persuaded the large majority of the German (and European) public, through his disinformation campaign with the “Ems Dispatch” (e.g., no. 854, part IX; no. 846), that the French ambassador Benedetti (per Gramont's orders) had provocatively insulted Prussia's venerable king at Ems.

That the facts belied this claim has been public knowledge since the 1870s; an unpublished source for remarks the monarch made barely fourteen days after the events at Ems may serve as one illustration. “He was,” so the king assured Count zu Solms-Sonnenwalde, the North German Confederation's chargé d'affaires in Paris during the July crisis, “utterly astounded by the story of the [Ems] insult; he never insulted Benedetti, and Benedetti never insulted him, and so far had he been from thinking so that he had said to Benedetti upon his departure from Ems, ‘au revoir à Berlin,’ on the certain assumption that Benedetti would likewise be traveling to Berlin!” (no. 882*). Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld, a nephew of the Prussian interior minister contributed contemporary testimony on September 9, 1914: “Before the outbreak of the war of 1870, the French ambassador had the outrageous ill breeding to ‘importune’ King William on the promenade in Ems, or so Bismarck informed the Prussian people, who then, furious at such unheard of goings-on, cried out for war. In my uncle's diary, … there is nothing of this. And yet, my uncle represented Bismarck in Ems at King William's [side]. All we get from the diary is that the courteous little Benedetti … behaved in Ems just as he had in Berlin.”Footnote ¹⁷ During the July crisis, the king moreover did not know that his chancellor had personally commissioned the North German Confederation's representatives in St. Petersburg, London, and Munich expressly to add, when they transmitted the “Ems Dispatch,” that the Russian tsar as well as the Bavarian king and the British foreign minister Granville seem to have had “a sense … that on the promenade Benedetti forced himself on the king in a provocative manner” in order to convey his government's demand (no. 854, parts III and IV).Footnote ¹⁸

My reference to the events in the once-renowned Ems spa is not intended to ascribe to the “Ems Dispatch” anything more than secondary significance in determining the course of events during the crisis in mid-July 1870. Even without the “Ems Dispatch,” military conflict at this point was unavoidable, given the constellation of personalities in Berlin (Bismarck and Moltke) and Paris (Gramont and Lebœuf). After Prince Karl Anton relinquished his son's claim to the throne and even before the “Ems Dispatch” became public, Württemberg's envoy in Berlin wrote to his government, “Even if the peace is, for the time being, undisturbed, nevertheless the tranquility and security of Europe has been shaken for a long time to come, and relations between France and Prussia have deteriorated in such a way that the smallest occasion may intensify the existing distrust into an outbreak of hostilities” (no. 853). Moreover, to persons with contacts in the Prussian leadership it was clear even in 1870 that the actual decision in the July crisis had been taken in Berlin not after the transmission of Gramont's provocative demand of a guarantee on July 13, but on the night before—without the king's agreement after consultation foreseen by the constitution in the event of a casus belli. In a note about the beginning of the war dated December 15, 1870, Leopold von Ranke, royal historian of the Prussian state since 1841, recorded as fact that “The outbreak [of war] has causes elsewhere, however, than people think. The war was resolved here [on July 12] by B[ismarck]. ‘We would be equipped,’ M[oltke] said. ‘If that's your view,’ B[ismarck] said, ‘then bring it on.’”Footnote ¹⁹ This note by Ranke, first published in the 1970s, predates by ninety years W. L. Langer's brilliant analysis of the crisis meetings in Berlin on July 12 and July 13, 1870.Footnote ²⁰ It definitively debunked Bismarck's myth-making about personally editing the “Ems Dispatch” on July 13,Footnote ²¹ and provides instead proof that Berlin had set the switches for war at the dinner on July 12, 1870, shortly after Bismarck's return from Varzin (and thus before the news of the French demands for a guarantee on July 13).

Let's turn to some other key documents to test whether the defensive interpretations later offered by German historians in fact withstand Reinhard Koselleck's “veto of the sources.” One of the essential points of controversy in interpreting Bismarck's policy in spring 1870 has been how to assess the international constellation after 1866, which has meant, first of all, estimating the added strain on Franco-Prussian relations. When press reports circulated shortly after Spain's September Revolution in 1868 that the Sigmaringer prince had a chance at the throne of Charles V (primarily because of his marriage to a Portuguese infanta), his father Karl Anton declared unequivocally, “Because of its [the Sigmaringer family's] Prussian connections, France [would] never be able to permit the establishment of the Hohenzollern dynasty on the Pyrenees” (no. 50). The judgment represented not only political insight into the way the antagonistic European balance-of-power system functioned, it was also a de facto recognition by the dynasty of “the rules of the game” of power politics. Karl Anton expressed himself even more explicitly on the occasion of the first, unofficial feelers by the Spanish government in September 1869: “If you are able to get Emperor Napoleon to declare to our king that he would see in the accession of my son a guarantee of European peace, and if then the king also expressed himself favorably, then we can begin to consider whether the interests of our family allow us to accept the crown” (no. 933*).Footnote ²² This signified no more than respect for Paris's vital interest in the Iberian peninsula and the de facto acknowledgment of France's traditional sphere of influence on its own southwestern flank.

Why Prince Karl Anton got involved in spring 1870 in the Spanish offer of the throne, despite his initial, decidedly negative stance, cannot be explained, contrary to what Bismarck always insinuated later, by dynastic ambition alone. King William had used his chancellor's serious illness during the latter's Easter vacation at Varzin to decline the Sigmaringer candidacy personally. When upon his return to Wilhelmstraße in May 1870 Bismarck sought to reverse the monarch's decision without his knowledge, he won over Karl Anton and Prince Leopold by invoking “the paramount interest” of the Prussian state—not least in the event of war with France (nos. 451, 464, 466, 479, 489, 563, 963*, and 985*). The Hohenzollern prince and his son Leopold manifestly could not excerpt themselves from the ultima ratio of Prussian “state interests,” even if this motivation, and the implicit appeal to the Prussian officer's sense of honor, cloaked, secondarily, the remnants of dynastic ambition (at least in the case of Karl Anton).

The two remarks of the prince quoted from 1868 and 1869 demonstrate (as do countless testimonies from the other side) that since 1866 Europe had been living on a powder keg, in an “armed peace”: a “Cold War” avant la lettre. Lord Lyons, the British ambassador in Paris, reported to London on May 6, 1870, “It would be quite a mistake to suppose that this is a moment at which it would be safe to defy France. On the contrary, a war unmistakably provoked by Prussia would be hailed by many as a welcome diversion from internal difficulties. So far as I can judge, Ollivier is not the man to shrink from one.”Footnote ²³ Two weeks before the explosion of the “Spanish bomb,” the diplomatic correspondent of a liberal German prince in Paris wrote that after the failure of Napoleon III's attempts at compensation for Königgrätz, and the recurring annual crises in Franco-Prussian relations, the “bitter chalice that Count Bismarck sets before Emperor Napoleon and that sooner or later must run over” lacked only one final “drop.”Footnote ²⁴ This last drop proved to be the Hohenzollern candidacy in Madrid—with its threat of a dynastic encirclement of France as in the days of Charles V. The first item with which Prince Karl Anton introduced his document collection on the succession question in Madrid was an article from the Prussian provincial press, barely fourteen days after the forced departure of Queen Isabella for France. Under the title “The Spanish Throne” (no. 17), the anonymous author, “certainly” employed in Bismarck's press bureau,Footnote ²⁵ recalls Habsburg rule in Spain and asks rhetorically whether the Hohenzollern, as the successors to the Habsburgs in Germany, ought not, “in the interests of Spain, Prussia-North Germany, and Europe,” to occupy the throne of Charles V with Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.

Is it conceivable that, given the tense international situation of spring 1870, Bismarck's “diversion” in France's Spanish “backyard,” kept secret from France (and all the other European powers), could have produced any reaction in Paris once it became known (especially after the appointment in May of Gramont as foreign minister) other than the one set in motion after July 3, 1870? That is, could the reaction have been anything other than to attempt to administer a resounding political blow to the Prussian adversary or, since France's primacy in Europe and the continued existence of Napoleon III's dynasty were at stake, to take up the gauntlet Berlin had thrown down? “Brinkmanship,”—if that was in fact the diplomatic strategy Bismarck intended in 1870—requires, if an acute diplomatic confrontation is to be exited peacefully, that one's rival be left the option of retreating without serious international loss of face. Prince Karl Anton was for all practical purposes paying respect to this diplomatic truism when, with King William providing cover, he relinquished the candidacy, thereby giving Paris the opportunity for a diplomatic victory over the (Sigmaringen) Hohenzollern and ultimately a triumph over Bismarck's policy. That crossed the Berlin chancellor's will to conflict. To have acquiesced in this diplomatic defeat would have left him no choice but to resign. Indeed, after his return from Varzin and the news of the Sigmaringen capitulation, he immediately confronted the king with his tried-and-true resignation threat.Footnote ²⁶ Just as in 1866 Bismarck had been lucky on the battlefield, so, too, he now had political luck on his side, as Gramont and the hawks in Paris were not to be satisfied with the king's and the Sigmaringens' respect for French interests in Spain. Gramont's attempt, four years after Königgrätz, to force the Prussian monarch to guarantee the renunciation of the candidacy “forever” was to turn his diplomatic victory over Prussia into a diplomatic Cannae for Bismarck. “Qui trop embrasse, mal étreint” (those who grab too much, hold on to little) also applies to power politics à la Gramont.

When Karl Anton conveyed his abandonment of the candidacy to King William on July 12, he wrote to Ems, “If we maintain the peace until next spring, then we can expect the most favorable solution to the military question during the winter session [of the Prussian parliament]” (no. 815). One can't avoid the impression that the prince surmised that the conflict with France was intended to resolve, at least temporarily, the critical domestic question of 1870/71: the expiration of the four-year “iron budget” for military expenditures, threatening the return of the military and constitutional conflict of the early 1860s, in sharper form. A few months after Bismarck's founding of the empire, Karl Anton drew a bitter bottom line of the Spanish affair for himself and the Sigmaringen Hohenzollern. To Radowitz he expressed his settled conviction that Bismarck “had only raised and exploited the candidacy with the intention and expectation of using it as a casus belli against France. He himself, the prince-father, and his son the prince had played a false and foolish role in the whole thing; they had been used for a political end that could never have been their own. Hence he declined any responsibility before his own generation or posterity for what had happened, either for himself or his son, even if he can still not say, nor wishes to say, anything about it yet publicly.”Footnote ²⁷

And Ambassador Solms-Sonnewalde, quoted earlier, who counted himself among the Berlin “doves” around Queen Augusta and, he was convinced, had suffered negative consequences for his career as a result, wrote in 1900, “Count Bismarck was clear in his own mind that we could not go on like this in the long run, that the … unification of Germany was not to be effected without another Bruderkrieg, which, however, he wanted to avoid at all costs because France and Austria would have intervened … Hence a unified Germany was attainable only by way of a national war against the hereditary enemy” (no. 973). In October 1870, Bismarck had declared to the foreign minister of Baden that “he had always foreseen that the German question could not be settled without war with Austria and France, and his efforts had been toward averting the need to fight both wars simultaneously” (no. 907). Given the rules of the antagonistic balance of power system then reigning in Europe, one did not have to be a diplomatic genius like the Realpolitiker Bismarck to presuppose a fratricidal war as the precondition for a decision in the Prusso-Austrian dualism for German supremacy, nor armed conflict with Napoleon III for the eclipse of French hegemony on the continent.

In the 1880s, the Reichsgründer granted the Prussian historian and National Liberal politician Heinrich von Sybel unrestricted access to the Berlin secret archives to work on his book The Foundation of the German Empire by Wilhelm I. When in the early 1890s Sybel sent Bismarck his manuscript analyzing the latter's post-1866 foreign policy, its account of the Franco-German crisis over Luxemburg in 1867 provoked the toppled chancellor to retort sarcastically that Sybel made him out to be “more virtuous but my judgment of the situation also more naïve than I was. I had never, then or earlier, doubted for even a moment”—thus the former chancellor—“that a durable relationship on friendly terms was possible with France, and that war was certain. I wanted, however, to postpone it and keep Napoleon in a good mood as long as possible” (no. 941). Franz von Roggenbach, former foreign minister of Baden and kleindeutsch advisor to the crown prince reacted equally caustically to Sybel's depiction of the Hohenzollern candidature, remarking that one was just not going to be able to “make the world believe,” as Sybel wanted, that “Bismarck could even for a second have been so stupid (blöde) as to have misunderstood the significance of the Hohenzollern candidacy” (no. 941).

Nevertheless, Sybel's apologetic thesis has enjoyed a fine career in German historical scholarship (characteristically, even better after the Bismarckian Empire's dual catastrophes in the First and Second World War). Speaking before the students of Heidelberg on the tenth anniversary of Bismarck's death in 1908, one of the leading national liberal historians of the first third of the twentieth century, Hermann Oncken, saw the greatness of the Prussian statesman primarily in one fact: “He, he himself personally, made the decisions for the three wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870–71. Indeed, he violently forced the great, decisive war of destiny of German history on the royal house and on his people, taking the huge responsibility on his own strong shoulders.”Footnote ²⁸ After the “Grab for World Power,” in Fritz Fischer's phrase, had foundered during the First World War, Oncken published his three-volume source-collection, The Rhine Policy of Napoleon III from 1863 to 1870, in 1926, at the behest of the Foreign Office to support its struggle against the Versailles Treaty's blanket charge of war guilt. With these volumes, he sought to demonstrate that France's German policy, in the tradition of Richelieu, furnished the real reason for the 1870 war.Footnote ²⁹ And as late as 1970, one could still seriously propound the thesis of the prewar “Friedrichsruhe Edition” of Bismarck's papers (whose justificatory character and monumentalizing intent are patent) that “Even after the Ems Dispatch, war was not ‘unavoidable,’ it was the French cabinet's decision for war alone that made it so.”Footnote ³⁰ Must one remind German historians of the words of Moltke, then Chief of the Prussian General Staff, that the attacker is not the one who marches first, but the one who forces the other to?Footnote ³¹

The objections to my interpretation that David Wetzel raised in such a fair and courteous manner appear to me based on a premise that—I am convinced—is not tenable. Among historians in Germany, they proceed from an attitude that may be politically understandable, but is historically unconvincing. That attitude had once moved Sybel to adopt the (as a historiographical dictum, bizarre) notion in his reply to Bismarck's aforementioned sarcasm that “virtue in this case seemed to fit you quite well” (no. 942*). Mutatis mutandis, this Sybel-syndrome—endowing the Realpolitiker Bismarck with bonus virtue during the prehistory of the “great, decisive war of destiny in German history”—has always marked the views of a popular sector of German historiography. As early as 1901 the politically experienced Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden, alluding primarily to Sybel, was moved to indict the historiography “of recent years which, sitting at its desk, thinks it knows better [than we historical actors do], and ingeniously surmises the most amazing hypotheses and inventions” (no. 977). The Grand Duke did not live long enough to witness what exegetical efforts some of Germany's Bismarck scholars would yet deploy in subsequent decades to make “the lion of European diplomacy look like a house cat.”Footnote ³² As Otto Pflanze, the leading twentieth-century biographer of Bismarck, put it, “The man who in 1863, 1865, and 1867 had known how to approach the brink und yet save the peace, when it was wise to do so, found it impossible to maneuver his way out of a situation of his own making in the summer of 1870 without resorting to violence. We are asked to believe that this tremendous talent … suddenly and briefly became barren and impotent to prevent what … he did not seek and did not want. The proposition, to be believed, requires an act of faith.”Footnote ³³

As we've seen, Bismarck, Realpolitiker par excellence, attached no value to appearing “more virtuous” (and therefore “more naïve”) “than I was.” In a letter to the Heidelberg historian Erich Marcks in 1902, his son Herbert provided a basic primer for historians on how to handle documents written by the Reich-founder. “One must bear in mind,” wrote the former foreign secretary, “that my father, as he himself explained more than once, never spoke, and never could have spoken, with anyone about his most important plans and the ways by which he hoped to achieve them, in order not to see them compromised by their indiscretions or self-seeking. About many events he imparted ex post facto … intelligence, when it could no longer cause any damage. One of the most characteristic is that he said he would never have succeeded in carrying out his policy had he told William I in late fall of 1863, ‘I will now bring Austria to wage a common war against Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein in the expectation of later breaking with Austria over Schleswig-Holstein and thereby achieving Prussia's supremacy over Germany in the only possible, military, way.’Footnote ³⁴ I could say much more along these lines … In the archives … many dispositions, … etc., will be found that were only written ad hoc, i.e., whose content was calculated for the precise moment at hand. That's diplomacy.” Herbert von Bismarck concluded this passage with a short course in Realpolitik: “Many remarks of my father, written and oral, [were] intended merely … to disguise his ultimate aims or to reach them via detours, if the straight path was not open” (“Addenda,” no. 983a*). Could it really be supposed that a document from Bismarck's hand, written in the year 1870, directly reveals his actual intentions about the Spanish throne candidacy? To raise the question means to answer it in the negative.Footnote ³⁵