Can anything be imagined more incomprehensible or more thoroughly preposterous?
What end is M. von Bismarck pursuing? By what thought and what views is he guided? The prince chancellor is neither mad nor blind; he has given abundant evidence of this; and yet, is it not folly, is it not blindness, to thus throw, without any appreciable motive, and with a heart as light as that of M. Emile Ollivier, sixteen millions of Catholics, including all their clergy and all their bishops, into a resistance which will be all the more obstinate and formidable because it will derive its strength from the oppression of conscience, from the suppression of liberty, the rending of the constitution, from the violation of justice and of rights? I have put these questions to eminent Germans of all parties, but have never got clear and satisfactory answers.
The Catholic Germans behaved [pg 487] admirably during the war; the Bavarian, Westphalian, and Rhenish troops were everywhere foremost under fire and in earning honor and glory. The priests and religious, both men and women, have shown a heroic devotedness on the battlefields, in the ambulances, and in the hospitals, so that M. Windthorst was enabled to say in the parliament at Berlin that many of those religious would go into exile wearing on their breasts the iron cross which they had earned during the last campaign.[193] The old antipathies against Prussia which prevailed along the Rhine and beyond the Main among Catholic populations were dying out; the establishment of religious liberty in Prussia on a more generous basis than in the lesser states had won the Catholics over to unity under Prussian hegemony; and the illustrious Bishop of Mayence, Mgr. de Ketteler, in an address which made a great noise in Germany and throughout Europe, raised the standard of rallying and unity.
The German Empire was consequently very near being established. M. von Bismarck stirs up a religious war which divides it in two and breaks it asunder. The war had brought together under the same flag Germans of all nationalities and all religious beliefs. Should not, then, all manner of pains have been taken to keep them united in the mutual work of the organization of the empire? Should not the first thought of a politician, after having achieved such wonderful success, and having before him the obstacles which still remained to be overcome, have been to begin by establishing peace in religious matters?
But I must repeat the question, What did M. von Bismarck do? He repulses the Westphalians and people of the Rhine who had become reconciled; he revives in Bavaria and in the South that particularism which was dying out; and on the political grievance he grafts a religious one; he doubles the obstacles of all kinds which lie in the way of his plans for Germanizing Alsace and Lorraine, so thoroughly French and Catholic; into their bleeding wounds he, as it were, introduces gangrene, by entering upon an unheard-of religious persecution, and without any pretext that he dare avow; he compromises in the most serious manner the work of unity, towards the founding of which he had aided so much; he acts as would the greatest adversary of that unity who could not contrive any better means for its destruction than to do just what Prince von Bismarck is doing—he drives into the ranks of opposition nearly half of the soundest population of the empire; he sets against himself the two hundred million Catholics spread throughout the world, and who are everywhere protesting against his oppression; he will also turn against him the old conservatives, who have been deeply hurt by the enactment of the law in regard to schools, as well as all sincere friends of religious and political liberty, so audaciously ignored by him. These friends of liberty are becoming scarce; they maintain, in the face of this odious violation of their principles, a shameful silence which they will have to break, if they wish to avoid making liberalism synonymous with hypocrisy.
Have I erred in comparing the policy of M. von Bismarck with that of Napoleon III., and his present blunder with that committed by the ex-emperor when, after the Congress [pg 488] of Paris, he broke up the splendid Western alliance?
When I endeavor to interpret M. von Bismarck's conduct, I can find but one motive which can serve for its explanation, and that is his alliance with Italy. That alliance, which he conceived necessary in order to keep the forces of France divided, and to render a war of retaliation impossible, has drawn him into a fatal hostility against the Catholic Church.
His ally, Victor Emanuel, has conquered the Roman States by stratagem and by violence; he has usurped in Rome the throne of the pontiff king, who among the monarchs of Europe possesses assuredly the most ancient and most venerated titles to sovereignty; he holds the Pope captive in the Vatican, until such time as he can compel him to set out on the road to exile; he deprives the Sovereign Pontiff of the church of that sovereignty on which his independence rests, and thus throws the universal church into alarm and mourning.
This outrage against the church, perpetrated at Rome by the Italian government, has had its counterpart in Berlin. No doubt the condition which Victor Emanuel set upon alliance with him has been to make the German Empire enter into the vast plot got up against the independence and liberty of Catholicity.
Well! without being a prophet, it is not difficult to predict that the Italian alliance will prove as fatal to the German Empire as it has been to the second Napoleonic Empire, and that on the Italian rock M. von Bismarck's work will be dashed to pieces, if he allows it to remain in the evil path in which it is now so deeply sunk.