Unification of Germany (1871): Bismarck and the German Empire

The unification of Germany was the process by which the many German-speaking states of Central Europe, with the major exception of Austria, were joined into a single nation-state under Prussian leadership. It culminated on 18 January 1871, when King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Achieved largely through the policies of Otto von Bismarck and three short wars, unification created a new great power at the heart of Europe and changed the continent’s balance of power for the next century.

Background: a divided Germany

For centuries the German lands had been divided into hundreds of states, from large kingdoms to tiny lordships and free cities, loosely held together by the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon’s conquests swept away many of these states, and the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806.

After Napoleon’s defeat, the Congress of Vienna created the German Confederation in 1815. It joined some 39 states in a loose league under Austrian presidency, with a federal assembly in Frankfurt. The Confederation was designed to keep order, not to build a nation, and its rulers suppressed liberal and nationalist movements.

Other forces worked in the opposite direction. German nationalism grew among students, writers and the middle classes, inspired by a shared language and culture. Economically, the Prussian-led customs union, the Zollverein, founded in 1834, removed tariffs between most German states but excluded Austria. Railways, industry and trade bound the northern and western German lands increasingly to Prussia.

1848: the liberal attempt

In the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, liberals tried to unite Germany from below. An elected national assembly, the Frankfurt Parliament, met in May 1848 and drafted a constitution for a German empire. After long debate it chose a small German solution without Austria and in April 1849 offered the imperial crown to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia.

The king refused a crown offered by an elected parliament, which he privately regarded as tainted by revolution. Without his support the assembly collapsed, and its remaining members were dispersed by troops in June 1849. A Prussian plan for a union of German princes was abandoned under Austrian pressure in 1850. Many liberals concluded that unity would come only through the power of a state, not through parliamentary speeches.

Bismarck and “iron and blood”

In 1861 Wilhelm I became King of Prussia. He and his war minister, Albrecht von Roon, wanted to enlarge and reform the army, but the liberal majority in the Prussian parliament refused to approve the budget. To break the deadlock, Wilhelm appointed Otto von Bismarck as minister-president in September 1862.

Bismarck was a conservative Prussian landowner and diplomat, not a German nationalist by temperament, but he saw that nationalism could serve Prussian power. On 30 September 1862 he told a parliamentary committee that the great questions of the day would be decided not by speeches and majority decisions, which had been the mistake of 1848 and 1849, but by iron and blood. The phrase, usually remembered as “blood and iron”, became the emblem of his policy. For four years he governed and expanded the army without a legal budget.

The three wars of unification

The first war arose over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. In the Second Schleswig War of 1864, Prussia and Austria together defeated Denmark and took control of the duchies.

Quarrels over their administration led to war between Prussia and Austria in 1866. Prussia’s swift victory, sealed at the Battle of Königgrätz on 3 July, ended Austrian influence in Germany. Prussia annexed Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, Frankfurt and Schleswig-Holstein, and in 1867 it formed the North German Confederation, a federal state of 22 members north of the River Main with Wilhelm I as president and Bismarck as chancellor. The southern states of Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt remained outside, though bound to Prussia by military alliances.

The final step came with the Franco-Prussian War. In July 1870 a dispute over a Hohenzollern candidate for the Spanish throne, inflamed by Bismarck’s edited Ems Dispatch, led France to declare war. The southern German states honoured their alliances, and German victories, above all at Sedan in September 1870, created a wave of national enthusiasm.

The proclamation at Versailles

During the autumn of 1870 Bismarck negotiated treaties with the southern states, which joined the North German Confederation in November. Bavaria, the largest, secured special rights over its army in peacetime, its railways and its postal service. King Ludwig II of Bavaria signed a letter, drafted by Bismarck, inviting Wilhelm to accept the imperial title; in return Ludwig received secret payments.

The new constitution came into force on 1 January 1871. On 18 January 1871, the 170th anniversary of the coronation of the first King in Prussia, the German princes and officers assembled in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where the German headquarters lay during the siege of Paris. Wilhelm I was proclaimed German Emperor.

Wilhelm was far from enthusiastic. He feared that Prussia would be absorbed into Germany and wanted the title “Emperor of Germany”, which the other princes rejected. At the ceremony the Grand Duke of Baden avoided the issue by calling for cheers for “Emperor Wilhelm”. The king was reportedly so annoyed with Bismarck that he ignored him as he stepped down from the dais.

The new German Empire

The German Empire was a federation of 25 states: four kingdoms, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities and three free cities, together with the Imperial Territory of Alsace-Lorraine taken from France. Prussia made up about two-thirds of its territory and some three-fifths of its population. The King of Prussia was always German Emperor, and the Prussian minister-president was normally the imperial chancellor.

The imperial parliament, the Reichstag, was elected by universal male suffrage, unusually democratic for the time. Real power, however, lay with the emperor, the chancellor and the Federal Council of the princes, and the army answered to the emperor rather than to parliament. Within Prussia a three-class voting system continued to favour the wealthy.

Myths and facts

Myth: Bismarck followed a master plan from 1862. Bismarck later encouraged this image, but most historians see him as an opportunist who kept several options open and exploited crises as they arose. He aimed above all to strengthen Prussia; a united Germany was one possible result.

Myth: unification was only the work of Bismarck. Economic integration through the Zollverein, industrial growth, railways, nationalist feeling and the reformed Prussian army all made his policies possible. The ideas of 1848 also lived on in the national movement.

Fact: many Germans were left outside. The small German solution excluded millions of German-speaking Austrians, while the new empire included Polish, Danish and French-speaking minorities.

Consequences and legacy

Unification created the most populous state in Europe after Russia, with the fastest-growing industrial economy on the continent. As chancellor until 1890, Bismarck tried to secure the new empire through a complex system of alliances, including the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879, and by hosting international meetings such as the Congress of Berlin in 1878.

Contemporaries quickly grasped the scale of the change. In February 1871 the British Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli told the House of Commons that the war amounted to a German revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of the previous century, because the balance of power had been entirely destroyed. Britain, Russia and Austria-Hungary now had to deal with a neighbour stronger than any single rival on the continent.

At home, the new state fought a conflict with the Catholic Church known as the Kulturkampf, passed laws against the socialists and introduced pioneering social insurance in the 1880s. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and the humiliation of France at Versailles, left a lasting hostility between the two countries.

The German Empire ended with defeat in the First World War and the revolution of November 1918. In a pointed reversal, the Treaty of Versailles that ended that war was signed in the same Hall of Mirrors in June 1919. Germany would be divided again after 1945 and reunited in 1990.

Timeline

• 1806, 6 August: The Holy Roman Empire is dissolved.
• 1815, June: The German Confederation is created at the Congress of Vienna.
• 1834, 1 January: The Zollverein customs union comes into force.
• 1849, April: Friedrich Wilhelm IV refuses the crown offered by the Frankfurt Parliament.
• 1862, 30 September: Bismarck’s “iron and blood” speech.
• 1864: Second Schleswig War against Denmark.
• 1866, 3 July: Prussia defeats Austria at Königgrätz.
• 1867: The North German Confederation is founded.
• 1871, 18 January: Wilhelm I is proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles.
• 1871, 16 April: The imperial constitution is adopted.

Why it matters

The unification of 1871 created modern Germany and, with it, one of the central questions of twentieth-century history: how a powerful, dynamic German state would fit into the European order. Its methods, unity imposed from above by war rather than won by liberal parliaments, left a mark on German political culture that historians still debate.