In 1862 Kaiser Wilhelm I appointed Bismarck Minister President of Prussia. On a visit to London he met future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli who said of Bismarck ‘be careful of that man – he means what he says’. Instead of recalling Bismarck to Berlin, the new Kaiser posted him to Paris as Ambassador to the Court of Emperor Napoleon III. The Regent appointed Bismarck Ambassador to Russia in 1859 and acceded as Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1861. In 1858 King Frederick Wilhelm suffered a stroke that left him paralysed and his brother Wilhelm was named Regent. It was in this climate of fear and violence that Bismarck stood and was elected to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies.īismarck aligned himself with the indecisive king on the brink of abdication declaring ‘I would rather perish with the king than forsake your majesty in the contest with parliamentary government’. Louis Philippe, last of the French kings, was forced to abdicate and Prussia’s King Frederick Wilhelm IV was besieged in Berlin with riots protesting against famine, unemployment and the Junker feudal system. He was born into the Prussian Junker class, the landed aristocracy, and educated at Berlin’s Platmann Institute before reading law at the University of Gottingen in Hanover where he developed a reputation for drinking, womanising and pugilism.īismarck entered the Prussian civil service but it bored him. His upbringing was rather more colourful. He described politics as the ‘art of the possible’ and predicted World War I with the words ‘some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off’.īismarck is remembered as a grim, humourless tactician who transformed Prussia and its surrounding Duchies into a united world power. Iron Chancellor Bismarck is acknowledged as the supreme chess master of European politics in the second half of the 19th century: analytical, persuasive and utterly ruthless. Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince von Bismarck (1815-1898) was Prime Minister of Prussia, architect of the unified Germany and its first Imperial Chancellor.
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