Transcription
Hello, welcome back to Western Civilization 102 and our lecture series. We, of course, were discussing on our last lecture the Revolutions of the 1820s and 30s and 1848 and 49. So, basically, the Congress of Vienna that met after the Napoleonic Wars and their goal of course was to prevent revolution, obviously did not work because Europe is inundated with revolutions throughout its countries in the years after the Napoleonic Wars and the French French Revolution.
So you would think that with Napoleon, he had been, you learned of course in a previous lecture that Napoleon had been exiled to the island of Saint Helena. It's very far away. There is no chance that he will escape. Shortly thereafter, he doesn't survive much longer. He is, of course, he dies, and you learned in a previous lecture about the circumstances of his death, and there was controversy around it. Whether he had been poisoned, they actually exhumed his body, as you've learned in a previous lecture, and they found traces of arsenic in his fingernails. But, uh, I want to say Dr. Robinson actually mentioned the fact that he had stomach problems and there was a common medicine used for that that contained arsenic. So that doesn't necessarily prove that he was assassinated. But either way, Napoleon died, and you would think we're done with Napoleon, we're done with Bonaparte. But that's simply not the case because we're going to see another Napoleon. His name is Louis Napoleon, the nephew of the emperor. He actually wins an election in 1848 and he starts, he he wins this election over a republic. France at this time is a republic. It's known as the Second Republic, the First Republic being of course during the French Revolution. But when Louis Napoleon wins this election, he will start gaining more and more power. In fact, of course, he will hold a plebiscite, we've heard that word before with the other Napoleon, and it would give him power to draw up a new constitution. And eventually, what happens, you'll find out more details in this lecture, but eventually, what happens is that the Second Empire is established and Louis Napoleon becomes Napoleon III, the emperor of the French. And, uh, so we've come full circle, I guess you can say, in France.
Now, also with this lecture, there will be discussion about the unification of Italy and Germany, which was of course extremely important to the makeup of Europe even in modern times. You you learned in a previous lecture about the creation of this area called, uh, the Piedmont Sardinia and the Piedmont area, and this will prove pivotal to the unification of Italy. There was a count by the name of Cavour, an Italian, and he will be a prime minister here in the Piedmont or in the Kingdom of Sardinia, and he will become the central figure in the unification of Italy. You will learn, of course, about the different stages that take place where Cavour will have to deal with the French and Napoleon III to try, he's trying to get the Austrians, who are a very prominent country, very dominant in Italy, and Cavour is dealing with Napoleon to try to get the Austrians out of Italy. We're going to see about how the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which is in the southern part of the Italian Peninsula, was conquered and eventually became part of a unified Italy by a man named Giuseppe Garibaldi. And in the end, of course, we will see that there were only two states left: the states of Venetia, which was under Austria, and of course Rome, which was under French protection. But there was an Austro-Prussian War, and that took place, that actually ties into the German unification as well. But this Austro-Prussian War is where Austria was forced by the Prussians to give Venetia back to Italy. And of course, there was also a Franco-Prussian War. You notice that Austria is going to war with Prussia, France will be going to war with Prussia, and when France is fighting Prussia, Napoleon simply can't keep protecting Rome. He's got a bigger fish to fry, so he has to pull his soldiers out of Rome. And finally, of course, the Vatican, Vatican City, is made independent because the Popes actually refused to have anything to do with the Italian government there in the beginning, and it was not until, I think, 1929 that they came out of hiding. So we're going to see that a unified Rome becomes a monarchy and it has a king.
With German unification, the key figure in German unification is a man by the name of Otto von Bismarck, a very, very important figure in Western Civilization. You'll see how he uses diplomacy and, uh, how he, he is very realistic, it's realpolitik, realistic in politics, to achieve German unification. But just make note of this: when Bismarck is unifying Germany, he wants to make sure he's from Prussia. Bismarck wants to make sure that Prussia is the dominant area in a unified Germany. He does not, in fact, he will go through a series of diplomatic incidents, we'll have some warfare that takes place. He makes sure that Austria is excluded. Austria will not make up what will become Germany. Bismarck even has to, um, fight France. He wanted to get the southern half of Germany in a, in a United Country, but he knew that he had to have a common enemy for them to join with their fellow Germans, and he finds that common enemy in France and Napoleon III. Remember I mentioned the Franco-Prussian War? Even the Austro-Prussian War had to deal with him, Bismarck getting Austria out of the picture. Okay, and in the long run, it helped Italian unification because Austria has to give Venetia back because they had been very dominant in Venetia. So they all kind of tie together. So Bismarck, of course, very important for German unification. Cavour, very important for Italian unification here in the late 19th century. So let's learn more about the Second French Empire and the unification of Italy and Germany.
The Revolutions of 1848 were, in a sense, the last hurrah for the Concert of Europe. In spite of the ouster of Prince Metternich from Austria, most of the Revolutions of 1848 were put down successfully, France being a notable exception. However, in the years to come, things would begin to change. Although there would be no more waves of revolutions like that in 1848, the the ensuing decades would see the unification of both Italy and Germany and a great change in the balance of power in Europe. In addition to that, the Concert of Europe, besides seeking to put down revolutions, had also sought to prevent major wars among the great powers. But in the next two decades, there would be five major wars that would disrupt the peace of Europe. A key factor in almost all of these events was the man whom 1848 brought to power in France, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He would be the catalyst for many of the events of the next two decades.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, though grievously underestimated by his opponents prior to 1848, became a successful president of France. However, the constitution of the Republic, the Second Republic of France, only allowed the president to serve for one four-year term, and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had ambitions that went beyond that four-year period. Therefore, during his term as president, he gradually gained control of all the key organs of government in France, placing his own men in the major departments, in charge of the army, and so on. And thus, at the end of his term, he was able to engineer a coup which did away with the old Second Republic and replaced it with a new Second French Empire with him on the throne as Napoleon III. As had been done after the French Revolution, Louis Napoleon named himself Napoleon III to suggest that the Bonapartes had always been the legitimate rulers of France since the fall of Napoleon the First in 1815. The argument here was that Napoleon's son should have been the ruler of France, and thus Napoleon the Second. In any case, Napoleon III, as he became, had a great deal of ambition for France. On the domestic front, he carried out a variety of improvements, uh, building new roads, building railroads, supporting industry and commerce, ingratiating himself with the liberal middle class. But in the foreign policy scene, one of the things he recognized was that his predecessor, Louis Philippe, had not generated enough excitement, and as a Bonaparte, he was not about to let that happen to him. Nevertheless, Napoleon III was wise enough to recognize that he was not the same man as his uncle. He was not going to make a splash in Europe by going out and conquering the entire continent. Rather, what he sought to do was to increase France's role in international affairs, and his long-term goal was to try to create a kind of United States of Europe in which there would be a unified Italy, a unified Germany, and in which France would play the leading role. He already had in mind an idea for who should be the president of this United States of Europe, that of course being himself.
So Napoleon, Napoleon III, was looking for ways to make an impact, and one of the ways that that came up fairly quickly had to do with the age-old Eastern Question involving the Ottoman Empire, the Russians, and the Eastern Mediterranean. For a long time, the Russians had enjoyed a privilege vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire of serving as the protectors of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. The Holy Land of Christianity, which is also of course holy to Judaism and Islam, was in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, who were Muslims. But the Ottoman Turks were fairly tolerant and allowed Christian pilgrims to come in and out of the Holy Land. Nonetheless, it had been customary for there to be a protector of these pilgrims, and the Russians had enjoyed that role for some time. They reveled in that role, not only because of the prestige, but because they also had designs on capturing Ottoman territory, and having representatives inside the Ottoman Empire gave them a way of spying on the Ottomans. However, in the 1850s, Napoleon III approached the Ottomans about making friends, that is to say, him protector of the Christian pilgrims, and this became a very sore point between him and the Russians and the Ottoman Turks. A larger issue, of course, was that the Russians wished to annex more Turkish territory, and they had consistently tried to increase their influence around the Black Sea, uh, thereby antagonizing the Turks more and more as time went on.
What wound up happening is that in 1854, there was a massive and catastrophic misunderstanding. The Turks believed that Britain and France were willing to support them militarily against the Russians. The reason for this was simply that the British and the French had established a strong naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean to discourage the Russians from further ambition. The British and the French did not want to see the Russians gaining more power and more territory in the Eastern Mediterranean region, and they were alarmed by Russian activity in Moldavia and Wallachia, so they stationed their fleets near Constantinople. However, the Turks interpreted this as meaning that if they went to war with Russia, Britain and France would back them up, and so they declared war on Russia in 1854, a war that was initially fought on the Black Sea. Unfortunately for the Turks, the Russian Navy proved much more than a match for the Turkish Navy, most of which ended up at the bottom of the Black Sea in fairly short order. France and Britain, alarmed by this turn of events, now found themselves drawn unwillingly into a war against Russia that comes to be known as the Crimean War. In some ways, one of the most inept wars in the history of warfare. By and large, it was fought on a little peninsula sticking out into the Black Sea called the Crimea, a great vacation spot now, not a great spot to fight a war in the 1850s. What wound up happening is that the French and British navies bombarded the Crimea, eventually landed troops there, and the main action came to be the siege of the city of Sebastopol, where the British and the French troops literally bled the Russians dry, both in terms of manpower and in terms of resources. It was not a well-fought war. Perhaps the most famous, uh, battle remembered today is the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade by the British, uh, in which the British charged into a valley surrounded by the Russians and were decimated, uh, for their trouble.
In the long run, however, Britain, France, and their ally Turkey prevailed, and Russia was forced to sue for peace. Key to this development was that during the war, in 1855, the Czar of Russia, the authoritarian Nicholas the First, died and was replaced by the much more liberal-leading Alexander II. If you can describe a Czar of Russia as liberal-leading, therefore he made peace. Ironically, the upshot of this war was that it returned pretty much to the status quo antebellum. Russia gave up almost nothing that it hadn't been willing to give up before the war, and therefore most of the bloodshed was for naught. But the impact of the war was very, very substantial in changing the diplomatic balance in Europe. First of all, it left the Russians angry. They were especially angry at the Austrians because Austria stayed out of the war. Austria, if you recall, had been rescued to some extent during the 1848 revolutions by assistance from the Russians, and Russia felt that Austria owed them a favor, but Austria remained neutral in the Crimean War. On the other hand, the British and the French felt that Austria should have supported them, and so they also were resentful of the Austrians. And of course, when you consider that Prussia never has liked the Austrians very much, Austria suddenly found itself after the Crimean War without a single friend among the great powers. Now, this is especially significant if we consider that Metternich is no longer in Austria to direct its foreign policy, which is now in the hands of a very young emperor and his ministers. But more so, if you consider that Austria had historically since 1815 been the principal opponent of the unification of Italy and of the unification of Germany. Now that opponent finds itself isolated.
Another factor is that one of the minor allies of Britain and France and Turkey in the Crimean War was the little Italian state of Piedmont-Sardinia. Piedmont-Sardinia did not contribute greatly to the victory, but it was at the peace table, and Victor Emmanuel II's chief minister, Count Cavour, therefore got an opportunity to meet people like Napoleon III and other heads of state and diplomats and to establish a role for Piedmont-Sardinia in the post-Crimean War diplomacy. Another point is this: Prussia also stayed out of the war, and nobody really expected them to do otherwise. Prussia was far removed from the Crimean War, had little reason to be involved on either side. But secretly, the Prussians provided military advice to the Russians, and therefore the Russians were grateful to Prussia, whereas they were resentful of Austria. So look at what's happened: Austria, the main obstacle to unification of Italy and Germany, is now isolated. Prussia, the hope of most Italian, most German nationalists for unifying Germany, is now in a stronger position. Piedmont-Sardinia, the hope of most Italians for unifying Italy, is also now in a stronger position. And Napoleon III could go home with a victory. It might be an ugly win, as we say in sports, but it was a win just the same, and it left him eager for more glory.
This played into the hands of Count Cavour of Piedmont-Sardinia. Following the Revolutions of 1848, Italian nationalists had all come to agree, after being sharply divided before, that Piedmont-Sardinia offered the only hope for Italian unification. And therefore, they looked to Victor Emmanuel II, a liberal constitutional monarch, and Count Cavour to bring Italy together. Cavour recognized this. He also recognized that Piedmont-Sardinia alone could not drive Austria out of Italy and bring about that unification. So he began to cultivate the friendship of Napoleon III, whom he had first met at the peace table after the Crimean War. In 1859, the two of them held a secret meeting at a place called Plombières, and they worked out an agreement where, or I'm sorry, this was in 1858 at Plombières, where they worked out an agreement. What the agreement was was this: Cavour was to provoke Austria into invading Northern Italy, more specifically into attacking Piedmont-Sardinia. Now, key to this was that Cavour had to make Austria look like the aggressor. At this point, Napoleon III would then come to the rescue, rescuing little Piedmont-Sardinia against the greater might of Austria. This would help to bring about the unification of Italy, and Napoleon III would be rewarded with territory in Nice and Savoy and with the eternal gratitude of the Italians, moving him one step closer to his goal of creating a kind of United States of Italy. So far so good.
Well, Cavour performed his part of the job very well. He proceeded to antagonize the Austrians in ways that were not entirely public. For one thing, he stirred up dissidents in Austrian-held territory, doing it in such a way that the Austrians knew he was behind it but couldn't prove it. In other words, they they suspected strongly that he was up to no good, but they had no concrete evidence. So they were angry at him, but their anger looked to the rest of the world to be unprovoked. Another thing that Cavour did to antagonize the Austrians was to offer safe haven in Piedmont-Sardinia for Austrian dissidents who were in flight from the government of Austria and for deserters from the Austrian Army. The Austrians demanded that this stop. Victor Emmanuel and Cavour played innocent, and eventually, in 1859, exactly according to plan, Austria invaded Italy and attacked Piedmont-Sardinia. At this juncture, Napoleon III, the brave defender of little Piedmont-Sardinia, came to the rescue.
So far, everything had gone exactly according to plan. But at this point, things began to break down. The Austrians apparently had not read the same script as Piedmont-Sardinia and France had. Had they done so, obviously they would have known that at this point their role was to lose and go home. But they apparently didn't know that. They fought very valiantly, and although they were not successful in defeating the French, neither were the French successful in defeating them. And in fact, Napoleon III found what he had thought would be an easy victory, a walkover, a publicity stunt, almost turning into a drawn-out fight that was costing him more in money, more in men, and more in prestige than he was prepared to risk. And so he backed out. He made a separate peace with the Austrians and left Piedmont-Sardinia hanging.
Now, you might think at this point that that's the end of the story for Piedmont-Sardinia. But in the meantime, all of the northern Italian states which had been under Austrian control had rebelled against Austria. Moreover, they had thrown their support behind Piedmont-Sardinia, recognizing Victor Emmanuel as their leader. And therefore, in a very real sense, all of the states of Northern Italy had united to fight against Austria, and they continued to do so. And even though the Austrians expected that with the French out of the picture, they would now have an easy time of it, that proved to be wrong as well. In fact, Piedmont-Sardinia and its northern Italian allies enjoyed so much success against Austria that Napoleon III began to rethink his decision. He began to conclude that he had made a mistake by pulling out so quickly. And so, in fact, for a second time, he threw his support behind Piedmont-Sardinia once again, in exchange for land and hopefully the gratitude of the Italians. The upshot of this is that Austria was gradually driven out of Northern Italy, and by 1860, the northern Italian states were essentially unified under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel II and his prime minister, Cavour.
The problem for Napoleon III is that he had pretty much forfeited any gratitude that the Italians might feel by pulling out of the war previously and making a separate peace with Austria. Although the northern Italians were glad to have his assistance the second time around, they no longer trusted him, and most gratitude they might have felt, uh, failed to materialize. Now, that takes care of Northern Italy. But of course, Southern Italy still remained a separate state, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and Central Italy, of course, was still under the control of the Pope in the Papal States. At this point, something unplanned and unpredicted now occurred. In Nice, at the time, was an Italian nationalist Republican by the name of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had fought with Mazzini in 1848 in Rome, who had fled Italy to avoid arrest and prosecution afterwards, but who had made his way back to the scene after a series of adventures in the United States and in South America that make Indiana Jones look like a Boy Scout. Garibaldi's career as a whole is absolutely one adventure after another, and one of the most fascinating stories of individual courage and good luck that you'll ever find anywhere. At any rate, Garibaldi now led a ragtag group of Republican rebels, known as the Red Shirts for obvious reasons, into invading the island of Sicily. They proceeded to overrun the royal troops in Sicily, to capture that island, and then to invade the mainland and to overrun Southern Italy, the Old Kingdom of Naples, as well. By late 1860, Garibaldi was effectively in control of Southern Italy, and thus you have Garibaldi and a group of Republicans controlling the South, Victor Emmanuel and Cavour and a group of liberal monarchists controlling the North, and the Papal States in between.
Now, at this point, Cavour became very concerned that Garibaldi might invade the Papal States, and that this might bring the Austrians back into the conflict. That was a very real possibility. So instead, he sent troops into the Papal States himself and reached out to Garibaldi, who now did a fairly rare thing. Garibaldi conceivably could have made himself king, dictator, president, whatever he wanted to be in Southern Italy, but in 1861, he stepped aside. He withdrew from the scene and allowed for the unification of Italy under Piedmont-Sardinia and Victor Emmanuel II. Thus, Italy was unified for the most part in 1861, becoming a liberal constitutional monarchy with Victor Emmanuel II as its king. There are two major exceptions to that: one, in northeastern Italy, there was territory in Venetia that remained in the hands of the Austrians, and that would remain in the hands of the Austrians until 1866. The other territory was Rome itself. Rome remained in the hands of the Pope, and that would not come into Italy until 1871. But otherwise, effectively, Italy was unified in 1861. Regrettably for Italy, not long after that, Count Camillo Cavour died, leaving Victor Emmanuel II without his great chief minister, and that meant that Italy in the coming decade would frequently flounder when it came to foreign policy.
Now we turn our attention to what's going on in Austria itself and in Germany more widely. The defeat, of course, of Austria in 1859 was an embarrassment, but Austria still controlled a vast amount of territory. Venetia in Italy, uh, it still ruled over the territory in Hungary, and it was a major player in the German Confederation. Its chief rival in the German Confederation, of course, was the northern German state of Prussia. And again, remember, Prussia is northern and Protestant, Austria is southern and Catholic. Prussia tended to dominate North Germany, Austria tended to dominate Southern Germany. But Austria, which remained reactionary even into the 1860s, was a state that remained opposed to a unified Germany. Austria opposed a unified Germany for a couple of reasons: one, if Austria were to become part of Germany, its own interests would be subsumed under the larger German nation, and very likely it would lose control over its other territories, most notably Hungary. On the other hand, if Austria did not become part of a new German nation, it would lose any influence in Germany that it had whatsoever. So, as far as the Austrians saw it, it was a no-win situation either way.
Now, on the other hand, it's not like Prussia set out to unify Germany in the early 1860s. Rather, what Prussia set out to do during that decade was to increase Prussian power, and as a consequence of that, one of the not 100% planned results was indeed the unification of Germany. Not surprisingly, for Prussia to expand its influence, one thing it had to do was to weaken the influence of Austria, and by 1860, that was a little bit easier to do because Austria was diplomatically isolated after the Crimean War, and Austria had suffered an embarrassing defeat in the War of Italian Independence against Piedmont-Sardinia and Napoleon III.
Now, one of the key things that happens in Prussia is a change in leadership as we move from the 1850s to the 1860s. Frederick William IV, who had been on the throne of Prussia during the Revolutions of 1848, began to experience problems in the late 1850s, was hit with his mental health, and gradually he lost the ability to govern effectively, so that power wound up passing to his younger brother, Wilhelm or William, who up to this point had spent his entire adult life as an army officer. Moreover, when Frederick William died, his brother took over as king, as William the First of Prussia, and had very little experience when it came to governing. He knew the army inside and out, but he knew nothing of the government bureaucracy, he knew nothing of how to run a civilian administration, and therefore he called upon a very controversial figure to become his chief minister, or as it's known in Prussia, as his Chancellor. That individual was a Prussian Junker, that is, a Prussian nobleman by the name of Otto von Bismarck.
Otto von Bismarck was controversial because in his youth, he had been a very fiery romantic, given to all sorts of wild behavior, dueling among other things, drinking a great deal, getting himself into all sorts of difficulties. He had since that time married and settled down considerably, but he was still considered to be something of a loose cannon. However, Bismarck had an enormous amount of ability. He was very bright, he had a great command of detail, and moreover, he had some very valuable experience. He had represented Prussia at the diet of the German Confederation, therefore he knew the heads of state and the diplomats of all the other German states. Moreover, he had spent some time as a diplomat in France, so he was intimately acquainted with Napoleon III, and he had spent some time as a diplomat in Russia, so he knew Alexander II, and in fact was on extremely good terms with Alexander II.
Now, these days, when we think of Bismarck, the image that immediately comes to mind is of a Prussian Junker with a big mustache wearing a helmet with a spike on top of it, and going along with this image is the notion that Bismarck was kind of a warmonger. Certainly, Bismarck was willing to go to war if that was necessary. He was willing to rely upon what he referred to as blood and iron if that was the only way to get things done. But the truth of the matter is, Bismarck didn't like war except as a last resort. Bismarck liked diplomacy, where he knew where all the pieces were, where he knew how everyone was going to act in advance, and where he could minimize the risks of Prussia before taking any sort of action. So while he does go to war several times in the 1860s, in every case, his pre-war diplomacy is designed to minimize the risk and to focus the attention of Prussia on a single enemy at one time.
Now, this was not all that hard to do in the circumstances of the 1860s, particularly not for a man of Bismarck's experience and ability. One thing is this: after the Crimean War, Great Britain decided that it had had enough of continental European affairs, and for the most part, the British backed away from involvement in the affairs of the continental powers, beginning what the British would later refer to as a period of "Splendid Isolationism." The British idea was to focus their attention and their resources on their vast worldwide empire and let the European nations fend for themselves. Besides that, Britain was very friendly to Germany. Britain was ruled, or at least reigned over at this juncture, by the long-lived Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, also named Victoria, or usually called Vicky, had married Frederick, the son of William the First of Prussia. Therefore, they were in-laws. Bismarck knew that he didn't have to worry about Britain, so in his international calculations, Britain could be counted upon to be friendly and also to stay out of things.
When it came to Russia, Bismarck also knew that he could count on the Russians to stay out of things. Alexander II had his own agenda at the moment. He was carrying out wide-ranging reforms inside Russia. He felt no compulsion whatsoever to come to the aid of Austria in any circumstances, and he felt very close to Bismarck, very close to Prussia, so anything he could do to help the Prussians, he was likely to do. That takes two very big players out of the international diplomatic calculus. Britain, Bismarck does not have to worry about. Russia, Bismarck does not have to worry about. Now, he does, of course, have to be concerned about Austria. Austria is the age-old enemy of Prussia and the principal obstacle to expanding Prussian influence in Germany at the time. He also has to be concerned about the newly united state of Italy. You know, what will Italy do in the event of war? And he has to be concerned about France and about Napoleon III. Luckily for him, Napoleon's ego and Napoleon's ambitions played into his hands. Napoleon III, remember, is eager to be a player, he is eager to make a difference, he is eager to make himself the leader of Europe, and that, as it turns out, works to Bismarck's advantage.
The first big event in what turns out to be the inadvertent road to German unification had to do with the question over Schleswig and Holstein. Schleswig and Holstein were two German states, both part of the German Confederation, that lay just south of the border between the German states and Denmark. In one of those peculiar conflicts of loyalties and possession that sometimes exist in Europe, Holstein were the personal possessions of the king of Denmark, that is, he held them as personal territories, but they were not part of the Kingdom of Denmark. However, the king of Denmark wanted to make them so. He wished to annex Schleswig and Holstein. In fact, he had had noises about doing so during the 1848 revolutions and then had been forced to back down, and in 1864, he began planning to do so again. In fact, he went so far as to actually annex the more northern of the two states, the state of Schleswig.
Now, here is what Bismarck does. Technically, at this juncture, the proper entity to respond to any attack on a single German state would have been the entire German Confederation, all 39 German states, including Prussia and Austria, but all the others too. All those states were represented in the German Diet, which met periodically and which had the right to conduct foreign policy. Had that happened, had the Diet been the entity to deal with Schleswig-Holstein, Prussia would have been just one player. But Bismarck now did a kind of end run around the German Diet. What he did was to suggest to Austria that since Prussia and Austria were the two largest states, the two strongest states, and the two states that would end up supplying most of the troops anyway, is that they act on their own without the involvement of the Diet. And that's exactly what happened. Prussia and Austria, for the moment, put aside their differences and allied to go into Schleswig and Holstein, drive out the Danes, and establish or re-establish the independence of those two states. It was a fairly easy war, the Danish War of 1864. Denmark was in no position to put up any real resistance to Prussia and Austria. In the peace that was made thereafter, Prussia was given the right to administer the state of Schleswig, and Austria was given the right to administer the state of Holstein. That is to say, Prussia kept troops in Schleswig, Austria kept troops in Holstein, and it just so happens that the geography of this means that Prussia has troops on both sides of Holstein: its troops in Schleswig and its troops in Prussia.
Over the next couple of years, Bismarck began making plans to get Austria out of Schleswig and Holstein and to neutralize Austria as a force in Germany. Now, in order to do that, in order to neutralize Austrian influence, Bismarck recognized that he would eventually have to go to war with Austria. Once again, doesn't have to worry about Britain, doesn't have to worry about Russia, but he wants to be sure what will happen with Italy and France if he does so. Well, he got a promise from Napoleon III of France that Napoleon III would remain neutral. There was secret negotiation between Napoleon III and Bismarck. Bismarck vaguely hinted that Prussia would do something to show its gratitude, hinting that it would recognize Napoleon III's role in Europe, hinting that some unspecified lands might be given to the French in return. Napoleon III promised to remain neutral. Now, as it turns out, Bismarck is not being a hundred percent honest. Neither, however, is Napoleon III, who was simultaneously also secretly negotiating with Austria. What Napoleon III really hoped would happen, and what he thought would happen, is that Prussia and Austria would go to war, that they would be, there would be a stalemate, neither side able to win, and he would be able to step in and save the day, solve the problem, and assert his, uh, leadership once more. He particularly needed to do that at this juncture because he had recently been involved in a colonial adventure in Mexico which had blown up in his face in a rather bad way. Also, Napoleon III's attempts to serve as an arbitrator in the American Civil War had come to nothing, so he really needed a diplomatic victory. By 1865, 1866, and Bismarck was able to sort of reel him in as a result.
Where Italy was concerned, Bismarck also negotiated with them and promised the Italians that if they remained neutral, he would see to it at the end of the war that Venetia was taken away from Austria and given to Italy. So at this juncture, Bismarck has isolated Austria. France, France has agreed to be neutral. Italy has agreed to be neutral. Britain and Russia are not going to be involved, and he now proceeded to provoke a war with Austria, again doing his best to make this look as though the Austrians were more at fault than the Prussians. Now, interestingly enough, Bismarck the diplomat had to browbeat the Prussian generals into accepting that this war was a good idea. The conventional wisdom at the time was that Austria had a stronger army, that Austria was a stronger state, that of the two, the one more likely to win in the long run was Austria. That turned out not to be the case at all. Once war was declared in 1866, in the Austro-Prussian War, the Prussians won so quickly that everyone, even Bismarck, was somewhat caught by surprise. They managed to defeat Austria in only about three weeks, and Bismarck, who earlier had been having to push the generals into war, now found himself restraining them from marching all the way to Vienna and sacking the city, which probably would have brought other states into the conflict. In any case, Austria was forced to sue for peace. Prussia consolidated its hold in Germany. Venetia went to Italy, and over the next year, Bismarck was able to expand his influence even more. By 1867, he brought all of the northern German states under the effective rule of Prussia in what came to be known as the North German Confederation. Technically a confederation in which the individual states still had some initiative, but in reality, they were all very much under the control of, of Prussia. So, in a sense, you could say that by 1867, Northern Germany has been unified.
At the same time, Austria, finding itself increasingly isolated, was facing difficulties from its non-German territories, most notably from Hungary, and in order to keep the people of Hungary pacified, in 1867, Austria agreed to something called the Ausgleich, which created in Austria and Hungary what's known as the Dual Monarchy. That is to say, Austria and Hungary essentially became two separate states who simply shared the same emperor. Aside from the fact that they were both ruled by Francis Joseph, they became separate entities. This helped to preserve some measure of union between them and also to save face for Austria, at least a little bit.
Now, at this point, Napoleon III approaches Bismarck about that not very clearly specified property that is supposed to come to France. At which juncture, Bismarck played ignorant, well, I don't know what territory do you mean. And the upshot of it is, of course, that Prussia does not turn any territory over to the French. This led to increasing anger in France at the time, and increasing demands, particularly from Napoleon III's wife, Princess Eugenie, and a war party, uh, in the country, demanding a war of revenge against Prussia. Napoleon III himself was a little reluctant to do this, but gradually was pushed more and more in the direction of war by his own people. Bismarck further antagonized the French by dabbling in the succession in Spain during this period. At the time, both the French and the Prussians took a great interest in who would come to the throne of Spain after the death of their current monarch, and Prussia's meddling, as Napoleon III saw it, further antagonized the French and pushed them closer to war. Bismarck was able to manipulate this to his own advantage at home. He played the German hero to German nationalists in the North German Confederation, and indeed, he began to get quite a following even in the southern German states, who saw Bismarck as a protector against Napoleon III. Furthermore, Bismarck also managed to carefully balance German liberals and German conservatives by appealing to both. On the liberal side, Bismarck's nationalism went down very well, but on the conservative side, his maintenance of military strength was also appealing. So he managed to have a very broad appeal both in Prussia and in the North German Confederation, as well as in the southern German states, which otherwise might have been suspicious of him.
Well, to make a long story short, the whole matter came to a head in 1870. William the First, Bismarck's ruler, was on holiday at a spa in a place called Ems. Napoleon III sent William an ultimatum demanding that Prussia withdraw from interfering in Spain, demanding that Prussia turn over territory to the French, and so on. William, in a conciliatory mood, wrote a fairly conciliatory reply, which he turned over to Bismarck to telegraph to Napoleon III using the relatively new telegraph technology. Bismarck altered the language of the telegram to make it less conciliatory and more provocative, and when Napoleon III received the so-called Ems telegram, his re-, the result was that he was infuriated, and again, make a long story short, he declared war on Prussia.
Now, this leads to the fifth and final war of this period, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. In order to get to Prussia, of course, French troops would have to go through southern Germany. In order to get to France, Prussian troops would have to go through southern Germany. Now, if you're southern Germans, southern Catholic Germans, traditionally loyal to Austria, you might be dubious about having Protestant Prussian troops come through your turf, but that was a heck of a lot better than having Napoleon's French troops come through your turf. Germans with a long memory remembered the last time a Bonaparte had invaded Germany, and they wanted nothing to do with that. So when the war broke out, the southern German states threw their support behind Bismarck and Prussia. The upshot of this is that Napoleon III was defeated. He was actually captured fairly early in the war, given fairly honorable treatment by the president, and eventually allowed to go free and to go and live in Britain. France, after the surrender, was forced into a rather humiliating treaty in 1871, in which, among other things, it had to turn over to Germany the long-contested territories of Alsace and Lorraine. In France itself, during the final phases of the war, yet another revolution broke out, a revolution in Paris that declared the Bonapartist monarchy at an end and established a Third Republic, and it also briefly experimented with trying to recreate a revolutionary commune in Paris itself. Ultimately, the most important development perhaps is that in France, Bismarck and the other German heads of state agreed to a treaty among themselves whereby the 38 remaining states of Germany were unified into a German Empire, a German Empire in which each German state, in turn, retains some measure of its own identity, but in which all 38 recognized a single ruler, William the First of Prussia, who now becomes the Emperor, Kaiser, of all Germany.
Italy, which had played its role by staying, was rewarded by getting control of Rome. The only territory remaining in the hands of the Pope after 1871 is the little independent state that it still controls, that is to say, the Vatican. And so we find ourselves in 1871 with a very different map of Europe from that which existed in 1848: a united Italy, a virtually destroyed system of Papal States, a united Germany, an isolated Austria, now bereft even of some of its control over Hungary, and we'll see how that plays out in the years after 1871 in lectures to come.
When we come back for our next lecture, we will talk about what happens after this unification of Italy and Germany around the year 1871 up until the beginning of World War One, which was in 1914. The war actually started in Europe in 1914 in the summer. The United States did not get involved until 1917, but World War One is still going on, even though the United States is not fighting initially. And so we'll learn about what's happening in Europe leading up to World War One, of course, and after this unification of Germany and Italy. Until next time.