1847

FWIV needed money for railways, summoned the provincial diets to meet in Berlin on 11 April as a United Diet to authorize new taxes. After the defeat of Napoleon, FWIII had promised his people a constitution and a parliament but only granted separate provincial diets in 1823.

To Johanna: 'From illusions regarding the Arcadian happiness of a dyed-in-the-wool landowner, with double-entry bookkeeping and chemical studies, I have been retrieved by experience. The profession was at the time still overlaid for me with the beautiful blue mist of distant mountains. Occasionally when one of my old fellow students is making a rapid career for himself I still feel slightly piqued by the thought that “I too could have had that” but then the conviction always asserts itself that man seeks his happiness in vain as long as he seeks it outside himself.'

Clark (p258): The State Indebtedness Law of 1820 prohibited the government from raising loans directly except through a 'national estates assembly'. In the 1820s and 1830s the finance ministry raised loans indirectly via a nominally independent bank and kept debt low but this was a fudge and now they needed cash for railways. Most of the deputies were either liberals or aristocrats with a liberal tendency. Hardline royalists like Bismarck were a minority and were 'drowned out by the roar of liberal and radical critique' (Clark). Most liberals felt the Diet was far short of their legitimate expectations.

To Johanna: 'One clings to principles only for so long as they are not put to the test. When that happens one throws them away as the peasant does his slippers and walks after the fashion that nature intended.'

Berlin's 'potato revolution'. Over the previous three years Germany, like much of Europe, had suffered an agricultural disaster — poor grain harvests combined with a blight that ruined the potato crop. This pushed up the price of food for some things including potatoes and wheat by ~100%. 1846/7 winter was long and severe. Continued railway building kept mining, iron, machine industries prosperous but hunger, disease and death afflicted many in rural areas and lower class areas of cities. In spring 1847, Bismarck saw food riots in his area and elsewhere. In Berlin there was a riot on 21-23 April. The food price shocks caused lower demand for manufactured goods. Also in 1845-6 and 1846-7 there were two shortfalls in the American cotton crop so prices shot up ~50%.

The ~600 deputies for the United Diet assembled in the White Hall of the royal palace in Berlin, the largest such assembly on German soil. It was a bleak snowy day after a long hard winter of great hardship. FW made clear in his Speech from the Throne: 'There is no power on earth that can succeed in making me transform the natural relationship between prince and people ... into a conventional constitutional relationship, and I will never allow a written piece of paper to come between the Lord God in heaven and this land.' He then made clear his real purpose was to authorize new taxes (necessary because of the 1820 State Indebtedness Act), not to hear their views of public opinion. The deputies were stunned.

Barclay: Gerlach and the liberals were agreed — the King had annoyed almost everyone. Clark (p259): It proved the conservatives right. The liberals from across the country worked together and formed new bonds. They asked for the Diet to be transformed into a proper legislature and said if it wasn't then they would not approve taxes. The conservatives were a shambles. As champions of local diversity and autonomy they struggled to work together on national issues. 'One defeat follows another' wrote Leopold von Gerlach (7/5). Although adjourned in June it was 'enormously important' (Clark) — its debates were published and news traveled around Prussia, conservatives and royalists were seen to have no strategy and convinced many that real constitutional change was imminent.

Bismarck enters the Diet as a substitute member. He opposed everything that weakened the Junkers whether proposed by the King or liberals.

Bismarck gave his first speech to the United Diet. A liberal aristocrat had argued that domestic reforms 1806-14 and the expectation of freedom they created gave impetus to the resistance to Napoleon. Many liberals thought the current situation similarly required a burst of liberal reform like 1806. Bismarck rejected the entire argument. He mocked the idea that Prussians fought Napoleon for a constitution — foreign invasion was enough of a reason. 'It seems to me that the national honour is ill-served by supposing that the maltreatment and humiliation Prussia suffered at the hands of an alien oppressor were not sufficient to make the blood boil and cause all of the feelings to be swamped by hatred of the foreigner.' As liberals heckled, he took out a newspaper and waited for them to stop before continuing, a trick he would repeat.

To Johanna: 'This whole business grips me far more than I thought', he was so excited he could scarcely eat or drink.

Speech to the Diet exploring the foundations of power, legitimacy and Christianity. He agreed with the liberals that the core of the state was a legal system. The crucial question was, what is the basis of it, is it Christianity or not? 'If we remove this foundation [the Christian] from the state, we are left with a state that is nothing but a random aggregate of rights, a kind of bulwark against the war of each against each set up by the old philosophy ['war of all against all' - Hobbes' 'state of nature']. Its legislation will therefore no longer renew itself at the well-spring of eternal truth but at the vague and changeable concepts of humanity as they happen to form in the heads of the people at the top. How, supposing they feel strong enough to do so, people in such states are going to combat the ideas of, for example, the Communists regarding the immorality of property, regarding the high moral value of theft as an attempt to establish man's inherent rights, the right to assert himself, is something I am not clear about. These ideas too are seen as human by those who hold them, in fact they are regarded as the proper flowering of humanity.' The Enlightenment view of an abstract reasoned morality producing justice and order was rejected and he touched here upon issues that would engage Nietzsche and politicians today. On 17th the Diet rejected the right of Jews to hold public office or serve in the Christian state. Membership in district or provincial diets was also closed to them.

In a speech he admitted that he had absorbed anti-semitism 'with his mother's milk' and would be 'depressed and humiliated' at the idea of having to obey a Jew.

Diet was prorogued having rejected FW's request for taxes unless he granted his predecessor's promise of a constitution. Bismarck travelled and spent the rest of 1847 not focused on the failure of his initiative and the dangerous clouds gathering.

Four weeks after the closure of the United Diet, Bismarck married at Reinfeld and went on his honeymoon through Prague, Vienna (where they walked in a moonlit garden in the Schonbrunn Palace), Salzburg. He remained extremely close to his wife until her death after his retirement. He once wrote to her (4/1/1851), 'You are my anchor on the good side of the river. If that drags, may God have mercy on my soul.' Private letters he wrote to friends made clear the extent to which he was still tempted by women after his marriage. Religion did not provide him with his politics and it did not make him the gentler, more saintly man he sometimes said he wanted to be. His adamantine realism and personal will to power may have been expressed more calmly but do not seem to have been diminished by his conversion. In later years, it seems that religion was used as a shield - 'God will judge' he would say, but he did not tolerate dissent on earth.

He told his brother, 'I am marrying a woman of rare intelligence and rare nobility of mind who is at the same time extremely charming and facile a vivre [easy to live with?] like no female I have ever known.'

He wrote to his brother of his conversion that 'a sort of Treaty of Passau has been established between us' [the treaty of 1552 first allowed Lutheranism and Catholicism to exist side-by-side in Germany]. The Lutheran pietist movement was an 18th Century revival which stressed personal communication with God, not the importance of the clergy and church hierarchy. Lutheranism did not claim to lay down principles for public policy and taught that service to the state was a religious duty. Cromwell would have understood Bismarck's religion better than modern liberals. 'I believe that I am obeying God when I serve the king.' Bismarck became friends with this network which extended to the Gerlachs and future King Wilhelm. When the latter became king, this network became even more influential. It was the Gerlachs who in 1851 persuaded the king to appoint Bismarck as Prussian Ambassador to the German Bundestag in Frankfurt. (Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach became an enemy of Bismarck in the late 1860s. In 1874 Bismarck dismissed his old master from the Prussian Hight Court.)

Metternich to Field Marshal Count Radetzky: 'If the past imposed great efforts on us, it was at least better than the present. You and I know how to fight against bodies, but against phantoms material force can achieve nothing, and today we are fighting phantoms everywhere.'

UK election: more Conservatives than Whigs but split between Stanley/Peel so Russell stayed as PM.

A financial crisis in London, some banks closed.

Bismarck and Johanna were in Venice where they met FWIV and Roon. He got the impression that FW was happy at his conduct in the diet. He returned home late September.

Radowitz wrote a memo to FW: 'The most powerful force of the present, that of nationality, is the most dangerous weapon in the hands of the enemies of law and order... Through all hearts flows this desire for a community to develop in Germany, powerful and respected abroad, elevated and in harmony within... This is the only thought that extends beyond parties... It is therefore the only principle on which a strong state system and society can be constructed. It is Prussia's task, with the closest connection with the rest of Germany to pick up the reins lying on the floor and as a true moral authority to create the impetus towards a rebirth of Germany.' This needs binding Austria closer to the Bund and to call a ministerial conference for its reform.

Marx told his father, after studying Hegel that year, that his excitement made him 'quite incapable of thinking' and he 'ran about madly in the garden'.