The Unification of Germany and the Aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War: 1870ā1871
On January 18, 1871, Otto von Bismarck stood in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles and consecrated his greatest triumph. A crowd of royal personages from all over Germany had gathered to celebrate the founding of a second German Reich that would unite the North German Federation with the South German Kingdoms under the Imperial Crown of Kaiser Wilhelm I. According to the diary of the Kaiserās son, the Emperor gave a short address to the assembly, at the conclusion of which
Count Bismarck came forward, looking in the grimmest of humors, and read out in an expressionless business-like way and without any trace of warmth or feeling for the occasion, the address āto the German people.ā [ā¦] Then the Grand Duke of Baden came forward with unaffected, quiet dignity that is so peculiarly his and with uplifted hand cried in a loud voice: āLong live His Imperial Majesty the Emperor William!ā A thundering hurrah at least six times repeated shook the room, while the flags and standards waved over the head of the new Emperor of Germany and āHeil Dir im Siegerkranzā rang out. 1
Beneath the lavish ceilings of the Hall of Mirrors, the era of the modern nation state had officially dawned. The social reforms enacted in Germany during Bismarckās twenty-eight year Chancellorship transformed the government he created into a prototype of the modern state that would shape the domestic agendas of the leading countries of the West into their present forms. The Constitution of the German Empire (drafted by Bismarck himself) borrowed a bicameral legislature, universal male suffrage, and a vibrant party system from British and American models of governance, but Bismarckās most progressive legislative innovation was to combine these with the comprehensive social welfare package he pushed through Reichstag between 1883 and 1889, fifty years before the election of Franklin Roosevelt and almost thirty years before similar laws were passed in England. Bismarckās social security laws guaranteed working class Germans medical insurance, old age and disability pensions, accident insurance, and unemployment insurance. 2 With the passage of these laws, Bismarck succeeded in making the citizens of the new Reich more loyal to their governmentāand more dependent upon it for their worldly happinessāthan any other people in the nineteenth century. By the time he left office in 1890, the German state played an unprecedented role in the daily lives of its citizens and one that almost every modern state in the West would assume over course of the next century. No longer was the state a mere guardian against foreign oppression and domestic injustice; it was also a guarantor against the malevolence of chance, the vicissitudes of nature , and the cruelty of human mortality. In these and other ways, the modern state crafted by Otto von Bismarck during his almost thirty years in power resembled a provident God.
While Bismarck was working to lay the political foundations for the first true welfare state in the winter of 1871, the man who would go on to alter the moral development of the West as profoundly as Bismarck altered its political development lay in bed recovering from an illness he contracted as a volunteer medical orderly on the front lines of the Franco-Prussian War . 3 A year before the official founding of the Second Reich, a twenty-six year-old Friedrich Nietzsche took leave from his newly awarded professorship in Switzerland to come to the aid of his fatherland. Although he was born a Prussian citizen in Saxony in 1844, the Swiss university at which he taught had made his employment conditional upon the renunciation of his Prussian citizenship in hopes of preventing him from joining the Prussian army in the event of a war . 4 In the summer of 1870, he spurned his commitment to the university and joined the Prussian army anyway, serving in a volunteer capacity at the Battle of Wƶrth and the Siege of Metz. Ironically, the man who would one day become one of the modern state ās fiercest critics remained legally stateless for the rest of his life . 5 Although Nietzsche would declare in 1874 that āanyone who has the furor philosophicus will have no time whatsoever for the furor politicus,ā he qualified this statement by adding in the same breath that even a philosopher āwill not hesitate for a single moment to take up his position if his fatherland is threatened by a real danger.ā 6
On January 28th 1871, ten days after the establishment of the Second Reich, the French government accepted the German terms of surrender and an official peace was signed the following month at Versailles. The Prussian victory at the battle of Sedan in September of 1870 had destroyed the Empire of Napoleon III and led to the capture of the Emperor himself, leaving the administrative arm of the French government in shambles. Though republican revolutionaries in Paris made a spirited attempt to continue the war after the disastrous events at Sedan, the French never fully recovered from the setbacks they incurred in their battle with German iron and blood.
The defeat of the French by the Germans had political reverberations all over Europe, and perhaps none were more immediately felt than the capture of Rome by the Kingdom of Italy on September 20th, 1870. In August of that same year, Napoleon III had recalled the French garrison he stationed in Rome in 1849 as a gesture to his Catholic supporters. The war with Germany had taken a severe toll on French troops, and reinforcements would be needed if the French hoped to maintain their ground against an overwhelming German advance. Making matters worse was the fact that French diplomats had reason to believe that Bismarck was using the presence of French troops in Rome as a pretext to persuade Italy to ally with the Germans. Although the Italians ultimately chose to remain a neutral party in Bismarckās war , they decided to attack Papal forces in Rome after the French had withdrawn their garrison, resulting in the end of the reign of Pope Pius IX and the unification of the Italian peninsula under a single King. 7
No sooner had Pius IX ceded his temporal power , however, than he reaffirmed his supreme place in European politics by issuing one of the greatest extensions of papal spiritual power in the history of the Catholic Church. His āDeclaration of Infallibilityā became clerical law in July of 1870, and its chief function was to preserve the Papacy from the possibility of erring when declaring by definitive act certain teachings concerning faith and morals. Since roughly one-third of the new Prussian Protestant Reich was made up of Catholics, a cultural war (Kulturkampf) soon erupted between Bismarck and the Pope that would go a long way toward determining the course of German politics āand the direction of the thoughts of the young Friedrich Nietzscheāfor decades to come.
Culture War: 1871ā1872
In the winter of 1871, the Catholic Centre Party of the Prussian lower house sent a message to the German Emperor asking for his support in restoring political power to the Pope in Rome. The Emperor responded by declaring in a speech from the throne that the German state would not intrude into Roman affairs, a sentiment that was swiftly reinforced by the rest of the Landtag. 8 Although Germanyās decision not to defend the papacy was an ostensibly practical one, the fact that the moral teachings of the Catholic Church posed a serious threat to the liberal ideals upon which the n...