Bismarck and Gladstone Beyond Caricature

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Though they are often seen as polar opposites,the architect of modern Germany and the great British Liberal statesman shared more in common than one might think. Roland Quinault draws comparisons.

'It seems that those popular stars, the "Iron Chancellor" and the "Grand Old Man" will have to respond to another encore', a cover of an edition of the US magazine Puck, 1895.Gladstone and Bismarck were the two most important, enduring and influential European political leaders of the later 19th century. They were also near-contemporaries: Gladstone, born in 1809, was six years older than Bismarck but they both died within ten weeks of one another in 1898. They never met, however, and their tenure of office was quite different. Bismarck was continuously in power for 28 years. He was minister president of Prussia from 1862 to 1890, chancellor of the North German Confederation from 1867 to 1871 and then chancellor of the German Empire until 1890. Gladstone, by contrast, became prime minister on four different occasions but never held that office for more than five years at a stretch.

Contemporaries of the two men emphasised the differences between them. Gladstone’s secretary, Edward Hamilton, observed in 1890: ‘There were certainly never two men – the two most conspicuous men alive – who had so little in common.’ John Morley (1838-1923), the political lieutenant and biographer of Gladstone, thought that he represented the pacific and Bismarck the military tendencies of the era. Morley established the orthodox view of Gladstone as a liberal moralist, who was committed to peace, retrenchment and reform, as well as justice for the Irish and freedom for other oppressed peoples. Bismarck, by contrast, was considered, both in his own time and subsequently, as a conservative autocrat who unified Germany by ‘blood and iron’ at the expense of the liberals, social democrats, Roman Catholics and Poles.

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