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Wherein it is shown that Bismarck’s protest against disrespect for constituted authority was based on certain tragic historical instances he would not repeat.
¶ It is freely granted that ideas of “Liberty!” that many German patriots desired to see come to pass, in 1848, were not those of 1789; but elements of lawlessness, of mob-rule, of marchings to “Ca Ira!” of absurd glorification of the common man, and of snarlings at kings as kings, were largely in the spirit laid down by Robespierre, Danton, Marat and that crew, with their chosen gangsters of the guillotine. Bismarck would have none of it!
True, many of the old-line excesses were no longer used for political purposes, but Bismarck was too well-balanced, had too much common sense, in short was too strongly aligned with landed interests to endorse “popular” government on the old type from over the Vosges. His protests were all in support of authority, discipline, duty, devotion to a deliberately chosen monarch, who ruled by the will of God.
¶ In ’48 the talk of the “Rights of Man” really meant the rights of individual men—the tailor, the barber, the shoemaker—each of whom felt that the time had now come to overturn the political system of kings and to bring on the rule of the common people.
Old-line hatred of Napoleon had passed away. The French military despot of the early part of the century was now figured as a “great democrat,” whose wars had “all” been in the interest of the people. Could anything have been more absurd? The literary speculations of Rousseau, as to the status of a new society (such, for example, as running naked in the grove and rolling on the grass) were now replaced by loud discussions not on the Rights of Man, as a form of idealism, but the rights of all manner of men, each of whom felt that, under the new dispensation, hastened if necessary by bomb, dagger and poison-cup, the human race was to rise to nobler political ideals. It is not difficult to see that political theories of this sort have been indulged, in one way or other, by every generation in revolt against the settled ways of the fathers.
¶ Let us, therefore, go back to original sources and see for ourselves just what account the common people had given of themselves, in a political way, in France at the time of her so-called political millennium. We shall then be able to grasp Bismarck’s position clearly and be able at least to understand, if we do not support, his attitude of uncompromising severity toward popular rule, as understood at this moment in the political evolution of Germany.
¶ If it be a mark of progress to call God a superstitious idol and to endeavor by the guillotine to enforce political rights, then the precious French key to the Door of Destiny for this human race should be duplicated and placed in the possession of nations, far and wide, as the final expression of man’s best idea of himself, his wife, his child and his country.
This 1789-93 return to National paganism, both political and social, is the mockery that Bismarck decided with all his almighty strength, nay his supreme rage, to set aside; and for him Prussian Militarism, which he so jealously set his heart on, against the rising tides of French constitutionalism, otherwise mob-rule, was at once to prove the sharp cure and the dreadful counter-blow.