1866

Bismarck had been stressing over and over again since the 1850s that the existing federal relationship must eventually be ‘healed ferro et igni, because as things were at present Prussia and Austria were ‘smothering each other’ – literally ‘breathing each other’s breath away’. And for all his openness to new developments he had repeatedly set forth very precise plans for achieving that objective: to eliminate the Confederation to a great extent in the event of such a conflict, to keep Russia and Britain out of it, to secure at least the benevolent neutrality of France, and above all to mobilize the Lesser German national movement for his own ends. So far he had definitely achieved none of these objectives. Indeed it was already possible to foresee that such a constellation of circumstances, which would of course have constituted the ideal, was not going to present itself. Yet even when it eventually became clear that, given conditions at the outset, no certainty of success was going to be forthcoming, he did not hesitate to have ‘another go at the aforesaid lottery’ of a power politics in the style of Frederick the Great that put the punter’s own existence at stake, as he had announced to the Austrian envoy to the Federal Diet, Count Thun, at the end of November 1851. ¹