Two Chancellors Part 2

The la.s.situde, the disgust as well as the contempt for the _Bund_ increased from year to year. In 1858 he thought of leaving the career forever. He had enough of "this _regime_ of truffles, of dispatches and of grand crosses." He spoke of withdrawing "under the guns of Schoenhausen," or still better of "growing young by ten years, and once more taking the offensive position of 1848 and 1849." He wished to fight, without being hindered by relations and official courtesies, to throw off the uniform, and to "go into politics in swimming drawers (_in politischen Schwimmhosen_)."

What is there astonishing in it? Of all imaginable political men, M. de Bismarck was certainly the least fitted to have a regard and liking for a deliberative body essentially moderated and moderating, where everything was discussed in private, in elaborated speeches, thought over at length and still more freely discussed, and where the gashes and thrusts actually amounted to nothing. A great congress of peace could scarcely have any attraction for the ardent Percys whom the smallest conference of Bangor[23] caused, enraged, to jump out of their skins; and the _Bundestag_, as we have said, was a permanent congress of peace called to maintain the _statu quo_ and to remove every cause for conflict. The little incidents, the little manoeuvres and the little struggles for influence were not wanting, it is true, in this company, more than in any other; they served to maintain the good humor of the ordinary diplomats, and were generally considered as useful stimulants for the good management of affairs and good digestion of dinners. But they must have seemed paltry in the eyes of a man of action and of combat; they must have irritated, at times even exasperated him! To observe the affairs of the world from this post on the Main, which allowed them to be grasped in their _ensemble_; to profit by abundant information, to compose therefrom brilliant dispatches, fit to instruct and above all to amuse an august master; to utter occasionally a very _spirituel_, very malicious _mot_, and to rejoice at it; to make others enjoy it, even to carry it perfectly warm to Stuttgart, and to confide its further expedition to a gracious Grand d.u.c.h.ess,--that was an occupation which might content Prince Gortchakof, even charm the leisure hours of a man educated in the school of Count Nesselrode and grown old in the career. But how was it possible to make such an existence agreeable to a cavalier of the Mark, improvised into a minister plenipotentiary, or to shut up in such a narrow circle, though a pleasant one, a "_fiance_ of Bellona," still foaming from battles delivered without cessation for four years on a resounding stage! In order to find a fitting compensation in the new circle in which he was placed, he needed at least some great European combination, some great negotiation capable of exercising his faculties, and of making them known,--and they talked to him of _bric-a-brac_, of Upper Lippe! A negotiation as insignificant as that with the poor Augustenburg, brought to a happy end in 1852, could certainly not be counted among the triumphs worthy of a Bismarck,[24] and this was nevertheless the single and pitiful "bubble of fat" which he was able to discover in the soup cooked during several years at Frankfort!

It is true that the question of the Orient did not delay in breaking out, and that at first it even seemed to open vast perspectives. Prussia was well disposed towards Russia. The secondary States of Germany showed themselves still more ardent, and sometimes even went so far as to have the appearance of being willing to draw their swords; so much the worse for Austria if she persisted in making common cause with the allies; that might bring about important territorial modifications, and all to the advantage of the House of Hohenzollern! And the representative of Prussia to the Germanic Confederation ("his excellency the lieutenant,"

as he was then called on account of the Landwehr uniform which he liked to wear) gave a warm and firm support in this crisis to his colleague of Russia, who had become his most intimate friend. He was not, however, long in seeing that the Germanic Confederation would not desert its neutrality; that the secondary States, in spite of all the agitations in the conferences of Bamberg, would not take an active part either in one sense or in the other, and that the war would be localized in the Black Sea and the Baltic. He conceived a profound disdain for the _Bund_, was "conscious of its unfathomable nothingness," and hummed over the green cloth of the Taxis palace the _Lied_ of Heine on the Diet of Frankfort.

In addition, he experienced on this occasion a grief, which he never forgot, which he recalled many years afterwards in a confidential dispatch which has become celebrated. During the Oriental complications, he wrote in 1859 to M. de Schleinitz, "Austria overcame us at Frankfort in spite of all the commonalty of ideas and desires which we then had with the secondary States. These States, after each oscillation, always indicate with the activity of the magnetized needle, the same point of attraction." Nothing more natural, however; it was not from the empire of the Hapsburg that Hanover and Saxony had to dread certain annexation, as events have since proved only too clearly. But the man who can one day desire the destruction of great cities, as the hot-beds of revolutionary spirit, did not hesitate to condemn in his soul and conscience the small States as the inextinguishable hearths of the "Austrian spirit."

Austria, in truth, was not slow in taking in the thoughts and the resentments of the cavalier of the Mark the place which the revolution had lately held there, and the ardent champion of Hapsburg in the chambers of Berlin became little by little their most bitter, most implacable enemy in the _Bundestag_. Moreover, all the great men of Prussia, commencing with the great elector and Frederick II., and without excepting William I., have always had, as regards Austria, "two souls in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s" like Faust, or, like Rebecca, "two children conflicting with one another in her bosom;" in a word, two principles, one of which imbued them with an almost religious respect for the antique and ill.u.s.trious imperial house, while the other urged them to conquest and spoliation at the cost of this very house. In the month of May, 1849, the honest and poetical King Frederick William IV. declared to a deputation of ministers from the Germanic States,[25] "that he should consider that day as the most happy one of his life when he should hold the wash basin (_Waschbecken_) at the coronation of a Hapsburg as Emperor of Germany;" that did not prevent him later from smiling from time to time at the work of the parliament of Frankfort, and from working for the "restricted union" under the auspices of General de Radowitz. And even M. de Bismarck was certainly very sincere as deputy of the Prussian parliament in his "Austrian religion," when in the name of conservative principles he undertook the energetic defense of the Hapsburg against the attacks of German liberalism; but he was now the representative of his government in the Taxis palace, encountered Austria on its way to a struggle for influence with the secondary States, to a struggle of interests concerning the affairs of the Orient, and he began to engage in an order of ideas, at the end of which he was to take up the policy of "heart blow." It was thus that on the occasion of the war in the Orient and in the very city of Frankfort there arose in the hearts of the two future chancellors of Russia and of Germany that hatred of Austria which was to have such fatal consequences, for, that the reader may not be deceived, it was the connivance of these two political men,--the fatal ideology of the Emperor Napoleon III. aiding them largely, it is just to add,--which rendered possible the catastrophes of which our days have been the witnesses: the calamity of Sadowa, and the destruction of the _Bund_, and the dismemberment of Denmark as well as of France! With Prince Gortchakof, this sentiment of hostility burst forth suddenly in consequence of an erroneous appreciation of events, but which his whole nation shared with him. With M. de Bismarck, the hatred of Austria had not an origin so spontaneous; it had not, for instance, as an origin, the grievances of Olmutz, which the deputy of the Mark had on the contrary been able to easily overcome; it was slow in forming, it developed, consolidated itself in consequence of a long and daily struggle in the heart of the _Bund_, in consequence of an experience acquired at the end of several years of vain attempts, and from the definite conviction that Hapsburg would never of its free will, abandon the secondary States, and he defended them against every effort at absorption. Resuming the instruction which his sojourn of eight years at Frankfort had given him, the representative of Prussia to the Germanic Confederation wrote in 1859, in his often quoted dispatch to M. de Schleinitz, those remarkable words: "I see in our federal relations a fault which sooner or later we must cure _ferro et igne_."

_Ferro et igne!_ that is the first version of the received text "iron and blood," which one day the president of the council laid down in an official manner in a speech to the chamber.

At the same time that the ancient "Austrian religion" underwent with its former ardent confessor a transformation so radical, a no less curious change was wrought in his mind in regard to several other articles of the _credo_ of his party. Removed from the _melee_ and partic.i.p.ating no longer in the parliamentary struggles, he began to observe more coldly certain questions important in those times, and to temper more than one antipathy of past days. Since 1852, on returning from a trip to Berlin, he writes: "There is something demoralizing in the air of the chamber; the best men of the world become vain there and cling to the Tribune as a woman to her toilet.... I find parliamentary intrigues hollow and unworthy of any notice. While one lives in their midst, one has illusions concerning them, and attaches to them I do not know how much importance.... Every time that I arrive there from Frankfort, I experience the feelings of a temperate man who falls among drunken people." Many things in old times disgraceful and abhorred, take now a less repulsive aspect to the eyes of the statesmen maturing great projects for the future. "The chamber and the press can become the most powerful instruments of our external policy," wrote in 1856 the former despiser of parliamentarism and friend of M. Thadden-Triglaff, and it is thus that one finds in the correspondence of these times the vague idea of a national representation of the _Zollverein_, even a p.r.o.nounced desire for universal suffrage itself, provided that these means could become the _instrumenta regni_. The example of the second empire exercised then an influence which the historian should carefully bear in mind. This system of absolutism tinged with popular pa.s.sions, "spotted with red," to employ a characteristic expression of M. de Bismarck, seduced the imagination of more than one aspirant for _coups d'etat_ and _coups d'eclat_, and the former colleague of the Doctor d'Ester must have opened his cigar case more than once and contemplated there the little sprig of olive plucked from the tomb of Petrarch and Laura.

Yet the goal seemed distant, and how veiled was the future, still indistinctly seen! It was not under King Frederick William IV., whose mind became more and more clouded, that he was permitted to think of action; even the accession of the regent, the present King William, seemed at first to make no change in the exterior situation. The new ministers of the regent, the ministers of the _new era_, as was said then, were honest doctrinarians who spoke of the development of conceded liberties and of the strengthening of the representative _regime_. The good and _naf_, they even allowed William I. to proclaim solemnly one day that "Prussia need only make _moral conquests_ in Germany!"

Evidently the _new era_ was not yet the era of M. de Bismarck. During the years which pa.s.sed after the war of the Orient until his emba.s.sy in Russia, one sees the representative of Prussia to the Germanic Confederation in constant motion, on continual journeys across Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Courland, and Upper Italy, seeking subjects for distraction, or perhaps also subjects for observation, and each time returning to Frankfort only to raise a difficulty, break some _bric-a-brac_, and to press to the utmost the nervous and bilious Count Rechberg, Austrian representative and president of the _Bundestag_. His frequent excursions to Paris caused him to have a presentiment of the events which were preparing in Italy; he only became more aggressive, and there was a time when his recall was considered at Frankfort as indispensable for the maintenance of peace. It was at this moment that he thought of definitely abandoning this career, of throwing off the uniform, and of going into politics in his "swimming drawers." He consented, however, to do it in "a bear-skin and with caviar," as he expressed himself in one of his letters; in other words called to exchange his post at Frankfort for that at St. Petersburg. One hoped thus to remove him from the burning ground, to "put him on ice" (another expression of M. de Bismarck); as for himself, he perhaps attached other hopes to this removal, and in any case found consolation in seeing his former colleague of Frankfort become princ.i.p.al minister of a great empire, and with whom he was always on such good terms. The 1st of April, 1859, "the anniversary of his birth," M. de Bismarck arrived in the capital of Russia.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Plutarch, Theseus, _initio._

[2] _Aus der Petersburger Gesellschaft_, vol. ii. p. 156.

[3] Expressions from the Russian circular of the 6th July, 1848, addressed by Count Nesselrode to his agents in Germany.

[4] The Germanic Confederation was formed in 1816. Frankfort was chosen as its seat, whither delegates were sent from all the States of Germany retaining sovereign rights. These delegates formed the a.s.sembly called the Diet.

The a.s.sembly was composed of seventeen envoys, presided over by the representative of Austria. There were however thirty-one States exclusive of the free cities, represented in the last period of the Diet's existence. The Diet was so const.i.tuted that each of the following States or combination of States had one representative: Austria; Prussia; Bavaria; Kingdom of Saxony; Hanover; Wurtemberg; Grand Duchy of Baden; Electorate of Hesse; Grand Ducal Hesse; Denmark, for the Duchies of Holstein and Lauenburg; The Netherlands, for Limburg and Luxemburg; The Duchies of Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Saxe-Altenburg; Brunswick and Na.s.sau; The two Mecklenburgs (Schwerin and Strelitz); Oldenburg, Anhalt and two Schwarzburgs (Rudolstadt and Sonderhausen); Lichtenstein, Reuss, Schaumburg Lippe, Lippe Detmold, Waldeck and Hesse Homburg; The free cities, Lubeck, Frankfort, Bremen and Hamburg.

The votes were equal. Sittings were secret.

On important occasions the a.s.sembly was resolved into what was called the _plenum_, in which a greater number of votes were a.s.signed to the chief States, and the total number of voices was then increased to seventy. In these cases a majority of three fourths was necessary for any question to be carried.

The leading idea with the founders of the Diet was the preservation of internal tranquillity, the next, the formation of a league which should inspire other nations with respect.

Amba.s.sadors were accredited to the Diet.--TRANSLATOR.

[5] Russian circular of the 27th May, 1859, concerning the war in Italy.

[6] This young lieutenant was M. de Bismarck. The _Landwehr_ is divided into two levies. The soldier belongs to the first levy seven years, to the second levy for a like period.--TRANSLATOR.

[7] A writer in a position to be well informed, a former under secretary of state in the ministry of Prince Schwarzenberg, thus narrates the origin of Russian intervention in Hungary, tracing it back to 1833, to the celebrated interview of Munchengraetz between the Emperor Francis I.

of Austria and the Czar Nicholas. In one of the confidential conversations, Francis spoke with sadness and apprehensions of the sickly and nervous state of his son and prospective successor, and begged the czar to maintain towards that son the friendship which he had always had for the father. "Nicholas fell on his knees, and raising his right hand to heaven, swore to give to the successor of Francis all aid and succor he should ever need. The old Emperor of Austria was profoundly touched, and placed his hands on the head of the kneeling czar as a token of benediction." This strange scene had no witness, but each of the two sovereigns narrated it some months later to a superior officer who then commanded the division of the army stationed at Munchengraetz. This superior officer was no other than the Prince of Windischgraetz, who, later, in 1848, nominated and made generalissimo of the Austrian army at the critical moment of the Hungarian insurrection, took upon himself to recall to Nicholas, in a letter, the pledge formerly given at Munchengraetz. The czar replied by placing his whole army at the disposition of his imperial and apostolic majesty.--Cf.

Hefter, _Geschichte Oesterreichs_, Prague, 1869, vol. i. pp. 68-69.

[8] Session of the Prussian chamber of the 6th September, 1849. This speech is not reproduced in the official collection of the _speeches_ of M. de Bismarck published at Berlin.

[9] The battle of Sadowa, or as it is more commonly called in Germany, the battle of Konigsgratz, was fought on the 3d of July, 1866, and decided the result of the conflict between Prussia and Austria.--TRANSLATOR.

[10] We take the liberty of citing on this subject a piquante _scene d'antichambre_ which has its instructive side. There was then at Vienna, in the ministry of foreign affairs, a very original figure, an usher, the memory of whom is not effaced at the Ballplatz. He bore the uncouth name of Kadernoschka; placed in the large waiting room before the cabinet of the minister, it was his duty to introduce the different visitors to the chief. This M. Kadernoschka was an usher of great style: he had been trained by the old Prince Metternich himself and loved to recall that he had "exercised his functions" from the time of the famous congress of 1815! One day, after a long interview with Prince Gortchakof, Count Buol sees this good Kadernoschka entering with a more than usually solemn air. He had a communication to make to his Excellency "in the interest of the service!" And Count Buol learns that the Russian envoy, after having left his Excellency, had appeared entirely overcome and suffocating with anger,--that he had asked for a gla.s.s of water; that for half an hour he had walked up and down in the waiting room, gesticulating with violence, talking to himself, and crying from time to time in French: "Oh! some day they shall pay me well for that, they shall pay me for that!"

[11] Protocol of the conference of the 17th April, 1855.

[12] A religious ceremony which, in the Protestant Church, corresponds in a certain degree to the first communion in the Catholic Church.

[13] Referring to Henry IV., Emperor of Germany from 1056 to 1106, who humbled himself before Pope Gregory VII. at Canossa in 1077.--TRANSLATOR.

[14] Referring to the closing words of Cato's speeches: _Caeterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam_.--TRANSLATOR.

[15] Treaty of Gastein, 14th August, 1865, between Austria and Prussia on the one side and Denmark on the other.--TRANSLATOR.

[16] _Sturm and Drang-Periode_, first period of Goethe and Schiller.

[17] Varzin, the Tusculum of the German chancellor, is situated in Pomerania, to the right of the Stettin-Danzig road, and about ten miles from Schlawe. The comfortable dwelling-house is almost surrounded by a magnificent park of beech and oak trees. Varzin has been in M. de Bismarck's possession since 1867.--TRANSLATOR.

[18] In the popular edition of the book of M. Hesekiel, this scene is _ill.u.s.trated_ by a vignette.

[19] Berlin is situated on the river Spree.--TRANSLATOR.

[20] Session of the chamber of the 15th November, 1849. One knows that the chancellor of Germany has lately enacted a law which inst.i.tutes civil marriage in Prussia. However, none of the speeches which have been cited is found in the official collection of the _speeches_ of M. de Bismarck published at Berlin.

[21] Session of the chamber of the 21st April, 1849. See also the interpellation of M. Temme in the session of the 17th April, 1863.

[22] A circular of Prince Schwarzenberg, made public by a calculated indiscretion, after having related the incident of the telegraph, and the desperate course of M. de Manteuffel as regards the Austrian minister, added: "His majesty the Emperor thinks it his duty to comply with the desire of the King of Prussia, _so modestly expressed_."

[23] Shakspere, _Henry IV._ part I. act iii. scene I.

[24] It does not, however, fail to be interesting, and to even have a very piquant side. Still full of the conviction that they had made on Denmark a war "eminently iniquitous, frivolous, and revolutionary," the Prussian plenipotentiary to the _Bund_ labored, in 1852, very actively in dissipating for the future a possible cause of perturbation, and negotiated an Esau bargain with the Duke Christian-August Augustenburg, the former upholder of _Schleswig-Holsteinism_, and eventual pretender to the Duchies. Thanks to the intervention of M. de Bismarck, the old duke signed for the sum of one million and a half rixdalers given by the government of Copenhagen, a solemn act, by which he bound "_himself and his family_, on his princely word and honor, to undertake nothing which could disturb the tranquillity of the Danish monarchy." That did not prevent the son of Christian from impudently insisting on his pretended rights in 1863, nor even M. de Bismarck from supporting them for a certain time, up to the moment when the famous syndics of the crown cast the doubt in the soul of the first minister at Berlin and proved to him that the Duchies, belonging by right to no one, belonged to King William by the fact of conquest.

[25] The minister of Na.s.sau, Baron Max de Gagern was at the head of this deputation.

II.

A NATIONAL MINISTER AND A FAULT-FINDING DIPLOMAT AT ST. PETERSBURG.

I.

In the prodigious development which advanced the empire of the czars after the impulse which the genius of Peter the Great had given it, one can certainly signalize more than one Russian minister of foreign affairs whose name has a right to be commemorated by history. For instance, the mind of Count Panine was not an ordinary one, who conceived and caused to be accepted by different states the idea of _armed neutrality_ at sea, and this at an epoch when Russia scarcely began to be reckoned among the maritime powers of the second or third cla.s.s. If in this bold conception, as well as in the still more interesting attempts of Panine to limit the absolute power of the czars by aristocratic inst.i.tutions, the remote influence of an Italian origin could be seen (the Panine descended from the Pagnini of Lucca), one cannot, however, overlook the perfectly indigenous, largely, autochthonal character of another famous minister of the same century, that of the Chancellor Bestoujef, whose figure Rulhiere has drawn so very originally. Bestoujef, who spoke perfectly, feigned stammering, and had the courage to simulate this defect for seventeen years. In his conversations with foreign amba.s.sadors he stammered in such a manner as not to be understood. He also complained of being deaf, of not understanding all the _finesses_ of the French language, and had the same thing repeated a thousand times. He was in the habit of writing diplomatic notes with his own hand in a manner perfectly illegible. They were sent back to him and sometimes he could decipher their meaning.

Having fallen into disgrace, Bestoujef immediately recovered his speech, hearing, and all the senses.

Very different is the type which was presented during all of the first half of this century by the immediate predecessor of Prince Gortchakof, the chancellor of the emperors Alexander I. and Nicholas. Connected with Germany by origin and the interests of his family, never even having learned to speak the language of the country whose relations with other powers he watched over, Count Charles Robert de Nesselrode did not the less complete a long and laborious career to the satisfaction of his two august masters, and figured with honor in congresses and conferences at the side of Talleyrand and Metternich. Without having recourse to the too Asiatic subterfuges of a Bestoujef, Count Nesselrode knew and practiced all the allowable tricks of the profession, and few men equaled him in the art of preserving an air of dignity and ease in the midst of the most embarra.s.sing situations. He knew how to change his conduct without too great a change of language, and among other things managed in a very delicate manner the transition between the policy of the czar Alexander I. (unfavorable to the Greeks) and the frankly philh.e.l.lenic sympathies of his successor. During the last Oriental crisis he placed all the resources of a shrewd and subtle mind at the service of a cause in which he saw nothing but grave dangers, and of which he ignored the national and religious side completely. Differing from Bestoujef, and much more European in this sense than in many others, M. de Nesselrode lost in his disgrace or rather in his retreat, the greater part of his faculties and his virtues, and above all caused an immense deception by his posthumous memoirs, composed in the decline of life and of a hopeless insignificance. But perhaps this was nothing but a last trait of cleverness and diplomatic malice in order to deceive on this point profane curiosity, and to leave behind him a work as empty and uninstructive as possible of a life so well filled.

Not one, however, of the Russian statesmen who have just been named was a great minister in the Occidental acceptation of the word. No one of them (in order to make comparisons in absolute monarchies only) had the position of a Duke de Choiseul in France during the last century, the authority of a Prince Clement de Metternich in Austria in the present century, or even the notoriety and popularity which Prince Gortchakof actually enjoys in Russia itself. Bestoujef, Panine, Nesselrode were, one may say, much better known abroad than in their own country, and their contemporaries were far from attributing to them the merit which posterity later saw in them, thanks to the posthumous revelations of the archives. No one of them was raised to power by a current of opinion, nor sustained in his position by public favor; not one of them pretended to show an individuality, to impress a personal direction on the affairs, which he conducted. This is because since Peter the Great to the present government, the _eclat_ of the imperial name in Russia cast into the shade every other name, and instead of being a favorite or a great captain, every state servant was only the subaltern executor of a single and absolute will. The external policy, above all, was then considered as the exclusive domain of the sovereign, and the very fixity of the system rendered in some degree secondary and unimportant the question of the persons charged with fulfilling it. In fact, from the time of Peter the Great, the Russian government has always had in its relations with Europe certain traditions approved by experience, and certain sacred principles, from which it never deviated even in a small degree. The minister of foreign affairs at St. Petersburg, whatever his name might be, always had to labor to augment Russian _prestige_ among the Christian populations of the Orient, to guard the maintenance of the equilibrium of power between Austria and Prussia, and to extend the influence of his government among the secondary States of Germany. To these rules, so to speak, elementary and invariable, of the external Russian policy, there was added from the year 1815 an international principle of preservation, a superior idea of solidarity between the governments for the defense of established order, the feeling of the duties and of the common interests created in the representatives of the monarchical authority in opposition to subversive pa.s.sions sprung from the revolution, and it was this _ensemble_ of the views and convictions of the two emperors Alexander I. and Nicholas which Count Nesselrode had, during almost half a century, to enforce, in all the acts and doc.u.ments emanating from the chancellor's office at St. Petersburg.

It has been the destiny of the successor of Count Nesselrode to break little by little with all this _ensemble_ of traditions and principles, and to inaugurate for the empire of the czars, in its external relations, an entirely new policy. One may dispute the merit of this policy, and dispute it the more widely as it is still far from having borne all its fruit. What is indisputable and astonishes at first sight, is that Prince Gortchakof has been able to attach his name to a change of system which is marked in the diplomatic annals of his country, and to create for himself, as minister of foreign affairs in Russia, a situation entirely personal, an important position, such as none of his predecessors ever had. Alexander Mikhalovitch is not only the faithful servant of his august master, he is the veritable chief of his department, the directing minister; he accepts boldly his part of the responsibility, and above all his share of the _eclat_ in the different transactions of Europe. An equally new phenomenon in Russia, this minister not only retains the favor of his sovereign, but also that of the nation. He manages the public opinion of his country, he watches over it, sometimes he even flatters it, and it repays him. It has had some moments of infatuation for Alexander Mikhalovitch, even some moments of enthusiasm,--after the affairs of Poland; more than that, it has in a measure brought forward and created him. This elevation of the plenipotentiary of Vienna to the high position left vacant by Count Nesselrode in the month of April, 1856, was not without its results.