What is there astonishing in it? Of all imaginable political men, M. de Bismarck was certainly the least fitted to have a regard and liking for a deliberative body essentially moderated and moderating, where everything was discussed in private, in elaborated speeches, thought over at length and still more freely discussed, and where the gashes and thrusts actually amounted to nothing. A great congress of peace could scarcely have any attraction for the ardent Percys whom the smallest conference of Bangor[23] caused, enraged, to jump out of their skins; and the Bundestag, as we have said, was a permanent congress of peace called to maintain the statu quo and to remove every cause for conflict. The little incidents, the little manœuvres and the little struggles for influence were not wanting, it is true, in this company, more than in any other; they served to maintain the good humor of the ordinary diplomats, and were generally considered as useful stimulants for the good management of affairs and good digestion of dinners. But they must have seemed paltry in the eyes of a man of action and of combat; they must have irritated, at times even exasperated him! To observe the affairs of the world from this post on the Main, which allowed them to be grasped in their ensemble; to profit by abundant information, to compose therefrom brilliant dispatches, fit to instruct and above all to amuse an august master; to utter occasionally a very spirituel, very malicious mot, and to rejoice at it; to make others enjoy it, even to carry it perfectly warm to Stuttgart, and to confide its further expedition to a gracious Grand Duchess,—that was an occupation which might content Prince Gortchakof, even charm the leisure hours of a man educated in the school of Count Nesselrode and grown old in the career. But how was it possible to make such an existence agreeable to a cavalier of the Mark, improvised into a minister plenipotentiary, or to shut up in such a narrow circle, though a pleasant one, a "fiancé of Bellona," still foaming from battles delivered without cessation for four years on a resounding stage! In order to find a fitting compensation in the new circle in which he was placed, he needed at least some great European combination, some great negotiation capable of exercising his faculties, and of making them known,—and they talked to him of bric-à-brac, of Upper Lippe! A negotiation as insignificant as that with the poor Augustenburg, brought to a happy end in 1852, could certainly not be counted among the triumphs worthy of a Bismarck,[24] and this was nevertheless the single and pitiful "bubble of fat" which he was able to discover in the soup cooked during several years at Frankfort!
It is true that the question of the Orient did not delay in breaking out, and that at first it even seemed to open vast perspectives. Prussia was well disposed towards Russia. The secondary States of Germany showed themselves still more ardent, and sometimes even went so far as to have the appearance of being willing to draw their swords; so much the worse for Austria if she persisted in making common cause with the allies; that might bring about important territorial modifications, and all to the advantage of the House of Hohenzollern! And the representative of Prussia to the Germanic Confederation ("his excellency the lieutenant," as he was then called on account of the Landwehr uniform which he liked to wear) gave a warm and firm support in this crisis to his colleague of Russia, who had become his most intimate friend. He was not, however, long in seeing that the Germanic Confederation would not desert its neutrality; that the secondary States, in spite of all the agitations in the conferences of Bamberg, would not take an active part either in one sense or in the other, and that the war would be localized in the Black Sea and the Baltic. He conceived a profound disdain for the Bund, was "conscious of its unfathomable nothingness," and hummed over the green cloth of the Taxis palace the Lied of Heine on the Diet of Frankfort. In addition, he experienced on this occasion a grief, which he never forgot, which he recalled many years afterwards in a confidential dispatch which has become celebrated. During the Oriental complications, he wrote in 1859 to M. de Schleinitz, "Austria overcame us at Frankfort in spite of all the commonalty of ideas and desires which we then had with the secondary States. These States, after each oscillation, always indicate with the activity of the magnetized needle, the same point of attraction." Nothing more natural, however; it was not from the empire of the Hapsburg that Hanover and Saxony had to dread certain annexation, as events have since proved only too clearly. But the man who can one day desire the destruction of great cities, as the hot-beds of revolutionary spirit, did not hesitate to condemn in his soul and conscience the small States as the inextinguishable hearths of the "Austrian spirit."
Austria, in truth, was not slow in taking in the thoughts and the resentments of the cavalier of the Mark the place which the revolution had lately held there, and the ardent champion of Hapsburg in the chambers of Berlin became little by little their most bitter, most implacable enemy in the Bundestag. Moreover, all the great men of Prussia, commencing with the great elector and Frederick II., and without excepting William I., have always had, as regards Austria, "two souls in their breasts" like Faust, or, like Rebecca, "two children conflicting with one another in her bosom;" in a word, two principles, one of which imbued them with an almost religious respect for the antique and illustrious imperial house, while the other urged them to conquest and spoliation at the cost of this very house. In the month of May, 1849, the honest and poetical King Frederick William IV. declared to a deputation of ministers from the Germanic States,[25] "that he should consider that day as the most happy one of his life when he should hold the wash basin (Waschbecken) at the coronation of a Hapsburg as Emperor of Germany;" that did not prevent him later from smiling from time to time at the work of the parliament of Frankfort, and from working for the "restricted union" under the auspices of General de Radowitz. And even M. de Bismarck was certainly very sincere as deputy of the Prussian parliament in his "Austrian religion," when in the name of conservative principles he undertook the energetic defense of the Hapsburg against the attacks of German liberalism; but he was now the representative of his government in the Taxis palace, encountered Austria on its way to a struggle for influence with the secondary States, to a struggle of interests concerning the affairs of the Orient, and he began to engage in an order of ideas, at the end of which he was to take up the policy of "heart blow." It was thus that on the occasion of the war in the Orient and in the very city of Frankfort there arose in the hearts of the two future chancellors of Russia and of Germany that hatred of Austria which was to have such fatal consequences, for, that the reader may not be deceived, it was the connivance of these two political men,—the fatal ideology of the Emperor Napoleon III. aiding them largely, it is just to add,—which rendered possible the catastrophes of which our days have been the witnesses: the calamity of Sadowa, and the destruction of the Bund, and the dismemberment of Denmark as well as of France! With Prince Gortchakof, this sentiment of hostility burst forth suddenly in consequence of an erroneous appreciation of events, but which his whole nation shared with him. With M. de Bismarck, the hatred of Austria had not an origin so spontaneous; it had not, for instance, as an origin, the grievances of Olmütz, which the deputy of the Mark had on the contrary been able to easily overcome; it was slow in forming, it developed, consolidated itself in consequence of a long and daily struggle in the heart of the Bund, in consequence of an experience acquired at the end of several years of vain attempts, and from the definite conviction that Hapsburg would never of its free will, abandon the secondary States, and he defended them against every effort at absorption. Resuming the instruction which his sojourn of eight years at Frankfort had given him, the representative of Prussia to the Germanic Confederation wrote in 1859, in his often quoted dispatch to M. de Schleinitz, those remarkable words: "I see in our federal relations a fault which sooner or later we must cure ferro et igne." Ferro et igne! that is the first version of the received text "iron and blood," which one day the president of the council laid down in an official manner in a speech to the chamber.
At the same time that the ancient "Austrian religion" underwent with its former ardent confessor a transformation so radical, a no less curious change was wrought in his mind in regard to several other articles of the credo of his party. Removed from the mêlée and participating no longer in the parliamentary struggles, he began to observe more coldly certain questions important in those times, and to temper more than one antipathy of past days. Since 1852, on returning from a trip to Berlin, he writes: "There is something demoralizing in the air of the chamber; the best men of the world become vain there and cling to the Tribune as a woman to her toilet.... I find parliamentary intrigues hollow and unworthy of any notice. While one lives in their midst, one has illusions concerning them, and attaches to them I do not know how much importance.... Every time that I arrive there from Frankfort, I experience the feelings of a temperate man who falls among drunken people." Many things in old times disgraceful and abhorred, take now a less repulsive aspect to the eyes of the statesmen maturing great projects for the future. "The chamber and the press can become the most powerful instruments of our external policy," wrote in 1856 the former despiser of parliamentarism and friend of M. Thadden-Triglaff, and it is thus that one finds in the correspondence of these times the vague idea of a national representation of the Zollverein, even a pronounced desire for universal suffrage itself, provided that these means could become the instrumenta regni. The example of the second empire exercised then an influence which the historian should carefully bear in mind. This system of absolutism tinged with popular passions, "spotted with red," to employ a characteristic expression of M. de Bismarck, seduced the imagination of more than one aspirant for coups d'état and coups d'éclat, and the former colleague of the Doctor d'Ester must have opened his cigar case more than once and contemplated there the little sprig of olive plucked from the tomb of Petrarch and Laura.
Yet the goal seemed distant, and how veiled was the future, still indistinctly seen! It was not under King Frederick William IV., whose mind became more and more clouded, that he was permitted to think of action; even the accession of the regent, the present King William, seemed at first to make no change in the exterior situation. The new ministers of the regent, the ministers of the new era, as was said then, were honest doctrinarians who spoke of the development of conceded liberties and of the strengthening of the representative régime. The good and naïf, they even allowed William I. to proclaim solemnly one day that "Prussia need only make moral conquests in Germany!" Evidently the new era was not yet the era of M. de Bismarck. During the years which passed after the war of the Orient until his embassy in Russia, one sees the representative of Prussia to the Germanic Confederation in constant motion, on continual journeys across Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Courland, and Upper Italy, seeking subjects for distraction, or perhaps also subjects for observation, and each time returning to Frankfort only to raise a difficulty, break some bric-à-brac, and to press to the utmost the nervous and bilious Count Rechberg, Austrian representative and president of the Bundestag. His frequent excursions to Paris caused him to have a presentiment of the events which were preparing in Italy; he only became more aggressive, and there was a time when his recall was considered at Frankfort as indispensable for the maintenance of peace. It was at this moment that he thought of definitely abandoning this career, of throwing off the uniform, and of going into politics in his "swimming drawers." He consented, however, to do it in "a bear-skin and with caviar," as he expressed himself in one of his letters; in other words called to exchange his post at Frankfort for that at St. Petersburg. One hoped thus to remove him from the burning ground, to "put him on ice" (another expression of M. de Bismarck); as for himself, he perhaps attached other hopes to this removal, and in any case found consolation in seeing his former colleague of Frankfort become principal minister of a great empire, and with whom he was always on such good terms. The 1st of April, 1859, "the anniversary of his birth," M. de Bismarck arrived in the capital of Russia.