BISMARCK-SCHONHAUSEN, Otto Eduard Leopold von, PRINCE, of a noble family of the "Mark* (Brandenburg): b. SchOnhausen, 1 April 1815; d. 30 July 1898. He studied at Gottingen, Berlin and Greif swald; entered the army and became lieutenant in the Landwehr. After a brief interval devoted to his estates and to the office of inspector of dikes, he became in 1846 a member of the provincial Diet of Saxony. And later he entered the Diet of Prussia, when he began to attract attention as an ultra Royalist. He opposed the scheme of a German empire as proposed by the Frankfort Parliament of 1849. His diplo matic career began in 1851, when he was ap pointed Prussian member of the resuscitated German Diet at Frankfort. In the Diet, he gave open expression to the long-felt discontent with the predominance of Austria, and demanded equal rights for Prussia. He remained at Frankfort till 1859, when he beheld in the ap proach of the Italian War an opportunity of freeing Prussia and Germany from the domi nance of Austria. In the spring of 1862 King William, on the urgent advice of the Prince of Hohenzollern, transferred Bismarck as Ambassador to Paris, in order to give him an insight into the politics of the Tuileries. Dur ing his short stay at Paris Bismarck visited London, and had interviews with the leading politicians of the time, including Lord Palmer ston and Disraeli. In the autumn Bismarck was recalled, to take the portfolio of the Min istry of Foreign Affairs, and the presidency of the Cabinet. Not being able to pass the organization bill and the budget, he closed the chambers (October 1862), announcing to the deputies that the King's government would be obliged to do without their sanction. When the °conflict era," as it was called, approached a crisis, the death of the King of Denmark re opened the Schleswig-Holstein question, and excited a fever of national German feeling, which Bismarck was adroit enough to work so as to aggrandize Prussia by the acquisition of the Elbe duchies. Having disposed of the
Danish trouble, Bismarck carried out a similar policy toward Austria which resulted in the defeat of Austria in the war of 1866.
The action of France in regard to the can didature of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern for the throne of Spain gave Bismarck the op portunity of carrying into action the intensified feeling of unity among Germans. During the war of 1870-71, Bismarck was the spokesman of Germany; he it was that in February 1871 dictated the terms of peace to France. Having been made a count in 1866, he was now created a prince and chancellor of the German empire. Following the Peace of Frankfort (10 May 1871), the sole aim of Bismarck's policy, do mestic and foreign, was to consolidate the young empire of his own creation. Thus, con the unity of the nation and the author ity of its government to be endangered by the Catholic Church and its doctrine of papal infallibility, he embarked on that long and bitter struggle with the Vatican, called the Kul turkampf, in the course of which the Imperial and Prussian parliaments passed a series of most stringent measures (Falk or May laws) against the Catholic hierarchy. But Bismarck had underrated the resisting power of the Church, and motives of political expediency gradually led him to modify or repeal the most oppressive of the anti-papal edicts, leaving the Catholics virtual masters of the field. Other wise, his domestic policy was marked, among other things, by a reformed coinage, a codifi cation of law, a nationalization of the Prussian railways (as a preliminary step to imperial state lines), fiscal reform in the direction of making the empire self-supporting (that is, in dependent of matricular contributions from its component states), repeated increase of the army and the regular voting of its estimates for seven-years at a time (military septennate), the introduction of a protective tariff (1879), and the attempt to combat social democracy.