Last year, at Gastein, he tried to induce Count von Beust to join in the campaign which he wished to begin against the internationale rouge and the internationale noire, but the Emperor Francis Joseph baffled the attempt. The prince chancellor renewed it the same year with the emperor himself at Salzburg, but he failed a second time.
Has he met with more success at Berlin, upon the occasion of the meeting of the three emperors? Has he tried to get Russia and Austria to recognize not only the German Empire, but to sanction by their adhesion to it his home policy against “Romanism,” that is to say, against the Catholic Church, or has he at least succeeded in inducing the belief that he had not tried in vain? Has he sought to drag them into the war which he is carrying on against the Jesuits, against the religious orders, against denominational liberty, against Catholic teaching, against the clergy and the bishops, until such time as he can make it break forth at Rome, by laying, in the next conclave, an audacious and sacrilegious hand on the pontifical tiara?
We shall find this out before long. If Austria follows the policy of the centralist party of the German professors at Vienna and at Prague, to which Count von Beust has already yielded too much, and which is identical with the policy of the national liberal party of Berlin, she will have advanced the interests of Prince von Bismarck, and not her own; she will have labored for him and against herself; she will have turned aside the danger imminent to the German Empire through M. von Bismarck's blunders, and of which the Austro-Hungarian Empire should have profited; she will have, with her historical good-nature, served the views of Prussia to the detriment of her own; and Francis Joseph, the Apostolic Emperor, unfaithful to his traditions and to the arms of his house, will have made his policy subordinate to that of a Lutheran emperor!
I positively refuse to believe that any such result can come out of the interview at Berlin, albeit that our generation is accustomed to the realization of political impossibilities. I would fain persuade myself that, if the Prince von Bismarck has endeavored to draw Austria into his war against the Catholics and against Rome, he will have failed at Berlin as he did at Salzburg through the good sense of the Emperor Francis Joseph.
V.
The more I study M. von Bismarck's policy, the less I understand it. If he were a sectarian pietist, I could account to myself for the idea of perfecting the political and military unity of Germany by a religious unity, of creating a Protestant state: it would indeed be a sorry Utopia, and to attempt it would be to make the mistake of being three centuries behind his time.
But M. von Bismarck is neither a sectarian nor a fanatic; he is rather, I believe, a sceptic who has little care for religious controversies, and who probably understands very little about the question of the Papal Infallibility which he is wielding as a warlike weapon against the church. M. von Bismarck is a politician; politics he aims at and should be [pg 492] busied in; his mission is to help found an empire and not a schism or a sect. Now, it is the Empire, the political work, which he gravely compromises by disturbing so profoundly through a denominational conflict the religious quiet which that work needed for its consolidation. Instead of the German state founded on unity and general assent, it is the Protestant state founded on the deepest and most incurable divisions that he seems to aim at creating. There is no difficulty in predicting that he will lose the political unity in the pursuit of a religious unity which is but a chimerical and impossible anachronism.
This political course which the prince chancellor has inspired the Emperor William to follow, whose past one makes such a striking contrast with it, is to me an insoluble enigma, and raises doubts in my mind of M. von Bismarck's transcendent ability.
I will nevertheless try to make out this political enigma, by studying the pretexts on which the government of Berlin relies to justify itself, the circumstances by which it has been enticed, and the temptation to which it has yielded.
The pretext which it puts forward is the decision of the Vatican Council in regard to the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff in matters of doctrine.