Two Chancellors: Prince Gortchakof and Prince Bismarck

by Julian Klaczko

The world knows the magnificent decree which the "legists"—the syndics of the crown—did not delay in pronouncing, as well as the conclusions which the scrupulous minister conscientiously drew from them. There were judges at Berlin, and they proved it in overruling all parties, in declaring them all badly grounded in their pretensions: Hesse, Oldenburg, Brandenburg, Sonderburg, Augustenburg, none of them had the right of succession to Schleswig-Holstein. The King of Denmark alone had the titles! But as the King of Denmark had been forced by the war to abandon the provinces of the Elbe to the sovereigns of Prussia and Austria, M. de Bismarck concluded therefrom that the two monarchs could dispose of their "property" as they wished, without any intervention of the Bund, and he demanded of the Emperor Francis Joseph the cession of his part of the conquest for ready cash. The Prussian minister made this impudent demand in an arrogant dispatch, full of menaces, dated the 11th July, 1865, from Carlsbad, from the very place where the old King William had come to enjoy the Austrian hospitality during the season. The alarm was great for some weeks. M. de Bismarck made no mystery of the negotiations which he entered upon with Italy; he said to M. de Gramont "that far from dreading the war, he desired it by all means;" some days after, he even declared to M. de Pfordten, president of the council of Bavaria, "that Austria could not sustain a campaign, that it would suffice to strike a single blow, to fight a single and great battle from the side of Silesia to obtain satisfaction of the Hapsburg." In reality, he only wished to sound the ground and to make a careful examination. At this moment he was not yet sufficiently sure of the disposition of the Emperor Napoleon to dare to risk the great cast; he also wanted time to persuade the pious Hohenzollern to pronounce the "God wills it!" of a fratricidal war. He had to content himself with that convention of Gastein (14th August, 1865) which was only a provisional arrangement, yet the first breach made in the rights of the Bund, and like an indirect consecration of the conclusions which he had pretended, to draw from the decree pronounced by the famous syndics of the crown.

The very day on which he signed this equivocal transaction at Gastein, M. de Bismarck wrote his wife a short note as follows: "For several days I have not found a moment of leisure to write you. Count Blome is again here, and we are doing our best to preserve peace and stop up the crevices of the building. Day before yesterday I devoted an entire day to hunting. I think that I wrote you that I returned disgusted from my first expedition; this time I at least killed a roe, but I saw nothing else during the three hours that I devoted without cessation to experiments on all sorts of insects, and the noisy activity of the cascade below me drew from my heart the cry: 'Little brook, leave there thy murmur.'[51] After all, it was a very good shot made across the precipice. The animal, killed instantly, fell with its four feet in the air from a height of several church steeples into the torrent at my feet." After all, he no more missed the shot than when he slew, in order that he might no longer be the cherished candidate of the Bund, the poor Augustenburg, and made the little Duchy of Lauenberg fall into the Prussian game-bag! This fact of the chase and of diplomacy even had an extraordinary reëcho in Germany, in France, and even as far as Lord Russell, who experienced the shock. The principal secretary of state insisted on the honor of associating himself with M. Drouyn de Lhuys in a very eloquent protest against the arrangements made at Gastein, and the iron-clad squadron of England, which had not appeared in the Baltic since the war of Denmark, came this time at least to pay a courteous visit to the French fleet at Cherbourg. There, however, the demonstration of the two Powers of the East limited itself; M. de Bismarck could enjoy in peace his triumph and the title of count which the fortunate campaign of 1865 brought him.

Is it admissible to depart from the gravity of history to describe still another incident of Gastein, a little genre picture of manners which was much talked of at this epoch, and even became the object of confidential explanations between the president of the Prussian council and a devoted friend, all extremely devout? And why not, since the letter of M. de Bismarck to M. André (de Roman) concerning Mlle. Pauline Lucca is one of the most curious pages of his familiar correspondence, if it throws light in a very picturesque manner on that vast and bald forehead on which the hand of King William had just placed the coronet of a count. Well, in the midst of those political negotiations and the deer hunts, M. de Bismarck found time at Gastein to be photographed in a romantic attitude with Mlle. Lucca, first cantatrice of the royal opera at Berlin. The photographs caused a certain scandal on the banks of the Spree; the leaders of the party of the cross were especially moved at the thermal license which the former Levite of the tabernacle, the fervent disciple of MM. Stahl and de Gerlach, took. M. André (de Roman) was perfectly willing to accept the rôle of Nathan in the Bible, and, in a sermon written in entire confidence, he did not limit himself to talking of the Bethsabea of the opera; he also spoke some well-chosen words touching the reparation by arms which the first minister of Prussia had but lately wished to impose on the good Doctor Virchow, the very learned and very peaceful discoverer of trichina. M. André found that that was not the conduct of a true Christian; he did not conceal that his old friends sighed at not seeing their Eliakim assist at divine service, and even began to be rather uneasy at the state of his soul. It was to such a sermon that M. de Bismarck replied by the confidential letter which follows, and which a lucky indiscretion has since given to the public, a letter assuredly very characteristic, and which makes one think once more of Cromwell, whose memory has been so often called forth in the course of this study:—

"Dear André,[52]—Although my time is very much restricted, I cannot, however, refuse to reply to a summons addressed to me by an upright heart, and in the name of Christ. I am profoundly pained at scandalizing Christians who have faith, but I have the certainty that it is an inevitable circumstance in my position. I will not yet speak of the parties who are necessarily opposed to me in politics, and who not the less count in their midst a great number of Christians, who have far preceded me in the way of salvation, and with whom, nevertheless, I am obliged to be in conflict on account of matters which, in my estimation as well as theirs, are terrestrial; I appeal only to what you yourself said: 'That nothing that is omitted or committed in the elevated regions remains hidden.' Where is the man who, in a similar situation, would not cause scandal, rightly or wrongly? I will grant you much more still, for your expression 'does not remain hidden' is not exact. Would to God that apart from the sin the world knows I had not upon my soul others which remain unknown, and for which I can only hope for pardon in my faith in the blood of Christ! As a statesman, I even think that I use far too much consideration; according to my idea I am rather cowardly, and that perhaps because it is not so easy in the questions which come before me to arrive always at that clearness at the bottom of which confidence in God exists. He who reproaches me with being a political man without conscience, wrongs me; he should first commence by himself testing his conscience on the field of battle. As regards the matter of Virchow, I have long since passed the age in which, on similar questions, one seeks counsel from flesh and blood. If I expose my life for a cause, I do it not only in this faith which I have fortified by a long and painful combat, but also by fervent and humble prayer before God; this faith, the word of man cannot shake, not even the word of a friend in the Lord, and of a servant of the church. It is not true that I have never attended a church. For just seven months, I have been either absent from Berlin or ill; who then can have made the observation on my negligence? I willingly agree that it has often happened, much less for want of time than for considerations of health, especially in the winter; I am always ready to give more detailed explanations to all those who consider it their vocation to be my judges in this matter: as for you, you will believe me without other details of medicine. As to the Lucca photograph, you would probably judge less severely, if you knew to what chance it owes its origin. Besides, Mlle. Lucca, although a cantatrice, is a lady whom the world has never, any more than it has me, reproached with illicit relations. Nevertheless, I would have certainly taken care to keep away from the glass pointed at us, if I had in a tranquil moment reflected on the scandal which so many faithful friends would find in this jest. You see by the details into which I enter that I consider your letter as well meant, and that I do not dream in any way of placing myself above the judgment of those who share with me the same faith; but I expect from your friendship and from your Christian knowledge which you commend to others, in future circumstances, more indulgence and charity in their judgments: all of us have need of them. I am of the great number of sinners to whom the glory of God is wanting; I do not hope the less with them that in His mercy, He will not withdraw from me the staff of the humble faith by the aid of which I seek to find my way in the midst of the doubts and dangers of my position; this confidence, however, should not render me deaf to the reproaches of friends, nor impatient at proud and harsh judgments."

Let us lock up the hair shirt with the discipline; let us only think of the diplomat in tunic and helmet, of the "iron count" (der eiserne Graf), as his people soon called him, and let us look at the disposition of France towards him at the moment when, after having left the rugged valley of Gastein, he prepared to visit the delightful region of Biarritz, to salute, interrogate, divine, and ... cast down the sphinx!

In the councils of the empire the debates had become from day to day sharper between the ancients and the moderns, between those zealous for the new right and the partisans of a more circumspect and traditional policy, in proportion as the Austro-Prussian conflict had grown more bitter and aggravated. The ardent ones would have willingly concluded an offensive and defensive alliance with Prussia. They showed the irresistible movement which was drawing Germany towards unity, and the advantages which France would reap by favoring this evolution in place of opposing it, by attaching to itself by the ties of an eternal recognition the Piedmont of Germany, as it had already done with that of the peninsula. Passionate friends of Italy, and still more violent adversaries of Austria, this bulwark of the reaction, of legitimacy and of temporal power, they cherished in the kingdom of Frederick the Great the incontestable representative of civilization, and trembled at seeing it going toward certain defeat in an unequal contest with the Kaiserliks. To hear them, the united action of France, Italy, and Prussia was not too much to preserve the cause of progress and to place Europe on new and immovable bases. Why, however, should not Belgium be the legitimate recompense of the French efforts in favor of Germany, as Savoy had been in consequence of the constitution of the kingdom of Italy, and how decline a combination in which each of the three nations representing par excellence modern ideas on the Continent was called to complete its respective unity?

Very different was in this respect the sentiment of the "ancients," the statesmen of the old school, of a whole political group of which M. Drouyn de Lhuys was in the cabinet the most authorized and clearsighted, if not the firmest. First casting aside all desire for Belgium, as a certain cause of a formidable conflict with England, they asserted the absolute impossibility of finding for France a compensation, however small it might be, in proportion to the injury which the unification of Germany would cause it. Without misunderstanding the Germanic aspirations for a federal reform, for a more homogeneous and united constitution, they asked what obligation France was under to hasten such a work, and if in any case it were not more desirable that such a transformation should be accomplished by the enlightened and pacific classes, by the federal diet, even by Austria,—always respecting acquired rights and particular sovereignties,—rather than by a power peculiarly military, bureaucratic, and centralistic? Was not that also the almost general wish of the other side of the Rhine, of the dynasties as well as of the chambers, of the princes as well as of the peoples, and had not the pretension of Prussia, among others, of confiscating for its own profit the conquest of Denmark aroused the consciences of all of them? Only the press of France and Italy which persisted in speaking of "the Piedmontese mission" of the Hohenzollern; on the banks of the Main and Elbe, every one rejected this pretended mission, and even the National-Verein, brought into contempt some time before while demanding "a united Germany with a Prussian point," did not the less repudiate M. de Bismarck, and declared him unworthy of taking in hand so holy a cause. As to the danger of seeing Prussia succumb in the conflict, and thus render the Hapsburg all powerful in Germany, there was a very simple means of preventing such an eventuality, that was to refuse the government of Berlin any aid in the enterprise which it meditated. However bold in truth M. de Bismarck was, it was not doubtful that he would never dare to defy Austria and its allies of the Bund in the face of a formal veto of France, which at the same time would take from him all hope of aid from Italy.[53] The plan to follow in such events seemed then as clearly indicated as singularly easy. Without mixing directly in German affairs, without wounding at all the Teutonic susceptibilities, one could oppose an insuperable barrier to Prussian ambition; one had only to maintain the statu quo. Such a policy would inevitably have the warm support of England, and would encourage the resistance of Austria and the secondary States. Without doubt, the Venetian question would be thus warded off; but, besides that, the peace of Europe and the greatness of France were well worth "the pearl of the Adriatic;" it was not forbidden to have great hopes for the city of lagoons from the progress of time, and from the good relations preserved and augmented between France and Austria.

Generally silent in the midst of these contradictory debates, loving, moreover, to plan beneath the passions and agitations of his surrounding counselors in the serenity of a calm and meditative intelligence, the Emperor Napoleon III. slowly ripened a project which seemed to him to sufficiently take into consideration the different arguments of the two sides, and which, moreover, well answered the recommendation made by him at about the same time to his minister of foreign affairs, inertia sapientia! Italy naturally was of more real interest to him than to M. Drouyn de Lhuys; that was a passion, perhaps indeed a youthful contract, and it was even so with the Empress Eugenie, who had become ardent for the affranchisement of Venice since the entry of M. de La Valette to the ministry, also since the day when M. the Cavalier Nigra had turned some couplets full of graceful allusions to a gondola which she had had made for the lake of Fontainbleau. Not less inveterate, but much more fatal, was Louis Napoleon's liking for the country of Blücher and Scharnhorst; the "great destinies" of the monarchy of Brandenburg in Germany formed one of the articles of his cosmopolitan faith. "The geographical position of Prussia is badly defined!" as he cried out the following year, at a solemn moment, and in a document too much forgotten.[54] He certainly did not intend to destroy the empire of Hapsburg, and allow the Hohenzollern to rule from the Sound to the Adriatic, as such a course would have readily recognized the intransigeans and the know-nothings of the principle of nationality. A strong appreciator of logic in the affairs of states, and in that (in that alone, perhaps!) truly French spirit, the former prisoner of Ham would have willingly constructed an essentially Protestant Prussia opposed to a traditionally Catholic Austria in the centre of Germany, leaving for the secondary States an intermediary and fluctuating situation in a religious as well as in a political point of view. An augmented and rounded Prussia on the Elbe and the Baltic, and thus rendered "stronger and more homogeneous in the North," seemed to him a useful combination, almost indispensable, counterbalancing Russia, and it was perfectly just that in exchange for new and vast Protestant territories, which it would acquire, the monarchy of Frederick II. should lose Silesia, a Catholic country and former patrimony of Hapsburg, that it should also renounce the Catholic provinces of the Rhine, situated too far outside of its natural orbit. "One would thus maintain for Austria its great position in Germany," above all its position as a great Catholic state, and the return of Silesia would be for the Emperor Francis Joseph an ample compensation for the Venetian province which he would cede to King Victor Emmanuel. For the secondary States of the Confederation, one would mediatize for their profit several of the little unimportant princes; one would add to them, perhaps, as a new member of the Bund, a new State composed entirely of Rhenish provinces taken from Prussia; one would assure for them, in any case, "a closer union, a more powerful organization, a more important rôle," which the great leaders of the party of Würzburg, the advocates of the triad, MM. de Beust, de Pfordten, and de Dalwigk, did not cease to demand. A curious fact, in these vast projects which embraced the world and which tended to determine and to satisfy the "legitimate wants" of Italy, Prussia, Austria, the Germanic Confederation, the only obscure question, and never decided in the mind of the French sovereign, was that of the compensations which, in the presence of this universal alteration, he could claim for his own country. He did not dare to touch the problem of Belgium; it would be, he declared very honestly, "an act of brigandage."[55] Neither did he deceive himself on the impossibility of annexing important Germanic territories; generally he stopped at the idea of a simple rectification of frontiers on the side of the Saar and the Palatinate, and of the neutralization of the German line of fortresses on the Rhine. Even reduced to these modest proportions, the end did not seem to him to be less worthy of being ardently pursued, in view of the very great and moral satisfaction France would find in the achievement of its work in Italy, and in the rational ordering of affairs in Germany.

Moreover, that which, in the situation in which he was engaged, especially flattered his instincts, generous at bottom and vaguely humanitarian, was that he hoped to reap considerable advantages for his own country, for the entire universe, without any necessity of drawing the sword, without spilling a drop of blood, "by moral force only," by the ascendancy of the name of France. He was resolved to "remain in a watchful neutrality," not to leave it except in the extreme case of the too complete victories of one of the belligerents menacing "the overthrow of the equilibrium and the modification of the map of Europe for the benefit of a single Power." He proclaimed it very loudly, on all occasions, and gloried in such "disinterested" policy,—a very strange policy, however, and which, according to the very judicious mot of Prince Napoleon, declared itself in advance hostile to the conqueror. "You have changed the address of your letter," said with fine raillery the conqueror of Austerlitz to the Prussian envoy who brought him the congratulations of his sovereign; the nephew of Napoleon I. acted in such a manner that he could not change the address, alienating in advance the still unknown conqueror. It is true that he believed he knew him, that, with all the world, he saw him in the Emperor of Austria, and that he counted on making with him preventive arrangements. Moreover, even should the army of William I. show itself much superior to the general opinion one had of it,—and, more perspicacious in that than his followers, he fully admitted such an eventuality,—still he only saw in this case a long and fatiguing conflict which would exhaust the two parties and would allow him more easily to intervene as judge of the combat and as protector of the right. He thus hoped, in any case, at his time and at his convenience, to be able to pronounce a word of peace, of equity, and of equilibrium, and he was convinced that "this word would be heard." It was important for the moment that Prussia should begin the combat, and to decide it in its favor it would be necessary for it to procure the alliance of Italy. It was also necessary to carefully avoid with the court of Berlin an untimely debate on the combinations and compensations to come; the least insistence on this delicate point might wound the patriotic feelings of William I., cool his warlike ardor, destroy in the embryo a world of great things, novus rerum ordo! It was better to ask nothing, to promise nothing, to compromise nothing. Moreover, what use in demanding notes of a bankrupt, taking sureties from one whose fate seemed so little assured, and whom, according to all probabilities, one would soon have to protect, to defend against too hard conditions which its Austrian conqueror would wish to impose on it?