Hence chiefly the confusion; for men’s minds were confused,—in France determinedly, and even in Germany, (owing to the still enduring force of obsolete opinions and antiquated habits of thought and action) uncertain.
When the war had once clearly shown what its end would be, they were few who could appreciate it. In France where were they who had ever heard the truth about “1806 and Jéna”? or who, after the 4th September, ‘70, were capable of realizing that the just retribution for Jéna was Sédan? All glory was given to one man—to Bismarck. For the six long months, till March, ‘71, he was the arch-destroyer—nothing else was taken into account; if he chose to establish a new holy Roman empire, of course he could do it; but it would be the work of his Titanic will, and nothing on earth could resist—since France could not! Thus reasoned French vanity, and if this curious condition of the public mind in France be not understood, the reconstitution of united Germany into a great cohesive state will never be rightly attained as a matter of fact.
France, therefore, continued (and did so until quite lately) to hold to the individual or accidental theory of a military unity achieved by fortuitous victories, to which the constant agitations of a whole people for hundreds of years, were in no sense conducive. Another fact that must also be acknowledged is, that this theory once firmly established, any remorse for the mysterious crimes of Napoleon I. was diminished if not erased. On the contrary, his conquests, his violent despotism, his wonderful supremacy—unjust in every sense, immoral, tyrannical, equally acquired and forfeited by the Corsican Invader, was regarded as an example; when defeat had to be recognized as undeniable, the national delusion soon came to take the form of retrieval, and the notion gained ground that what la chance or the luck of a great statesman had put together, might, from the same cause, be taken to pieces again!
Granted the principle of personal intervention, of the success of either one man or of even a group of two or three leading spirits, who was the original inventor, who the doer of the deed, the framer of the fact that threatened the world with a new master?
This query was not started for eighteen long years; not until the catastrophe that threatened the House of Hohenzollern with the loss of its noblest son, served to recall to the mind of all Europe what a thorough hero and citizen, what a perfect, undeviating German the crown prince had always been.
The first emperor of United Germany, the agent of the illustrious chancellor’s will, had gone to his eternal rest when the German mind began to reflect that only a dying man stood between the late ruler and a boy emperor! But was not that dying man the creator (if creator there had been) of the restored Teutonic state? Did not the revived empire spring from the races in which Prussia was incarnate? was it not in good earnest the Hohenzollern line, the descendant of the Great Elector that answered for the regeneration? Thence the dispute between the partisans of Bismarck and those of Frederick III. Supposing a creation according to both Heinrich von Sybel and the chroniclers of French vain-gloriousness, who was the creator? The answer of history was, “No one.” The German nation—or truer still, the thought of all Germany, for long ages, was the genuine source, it was the very soul of the entire people that from the ancient Germania of the Roman, breathed anew in the remnants of its primeval entity and clamored for its old integrity.
But we must not outstrip chronology; the first record of the events of the war of 1870, and of the mighty changes brought on thereby, is that of Sybel, not altogether wrongly entitled an “historical monument.” Professor Sybel’s five volumes do, assuredly, constitute a history founded on documentary evidence, if ever such a one existed, but for that very reason they are, perhaps, somewhat wanting in actual life. They are fashioned after the methods employed and approved of in bygone days, and present rather the character of a register than a record of deeds done by living men. As far as the testimony of hard, dry acts went, it is probably impeachable; but we then come to the question, Is documentary evidence in such a case sufficient to give all that is true? Is not truth, where human impulses and irrationalities are concerned, derived from sources lying higher than the regions sacred to “Blue Books”? Whereas it was to the certificates vouchsafed by state papers, and instruments of such like order, that Sybel’s reliability was chiefly due. Once admit the value of these vouchers (and their corroborative weight none can deny), and it becomes difficult to overrate the importance of Sybel’s still unconcluded “Begründung des Deutschen Reiches.”
The reader who for the first time takes cognizance of the contents of these formidable volumes, is overwhelmed by the amount of attestations they present him with, by his own inability to refute them, or by counter statements substitute a truer appreciation of what did really occur. The dry narrative of mere fact is thus, but the impression it should produce as of a fact lived through is wanting.
This history of Professor Sybel’s is a Prussian one; for which it is obvious that such extraordinary materials would not have been furnished him had it not been tacitly understood that his final verdict must be completely favorable to the Emperor Wilhelm I. and his powerful minister.
In the curious and wide-spreading complications, whence eventually resulted the Franco-German war of 1870, there are two distinct parts: the part before hostilities broke out, and the part after the victory of the Germans might be inevitably foreseen: the first period counts in its dramatis personæ all the states and all the statesmen of Europe. From the Crimean War to the cession of Venetia to Italy through France, there is not an event that is not a connecting link in a long serpentine chain. At the moment this may have escaped the eye, but, once fixed in its one perspective of distance, the chain shows unbroken and all is far less than has been supposed,—occasioned by any arts, manœuvres, or intrigues of the chief actors; the vulgar notions of Prince Bismarck’s incessant wiles, or of Louis Napoleon’s base designs against his neighbors may be discarded as relatively subordinate. The incidents that marked the gigantic game of chess played (not in Europe only) from the overthrow of the Orleans dynasty to the death of Friedrich III. and the fall of Bismarck in the winter of last year were neither the outcome of individual Machiavelianism nor entirely attributable to chance; both were all but in equal degree cause and effect. The actors personally in each case replied to the suggestions of circumstances they had but indirectly helped to bring about.