In 1853, the steel-mad entrepreneur married the twenty-one-year-old Bertha, a blonde fellow neurasthenic whom he romanced with steel: ‘Where I supposed I had nothing but a piece of cast steel, I had a heart.’ She gave birth to a son, Friedrich, but suffered in their dreary soot-smeared cottage. ‘One should be downright simple,’ he lectured her. ‘Knowing you have clean underwear under your dress should be enough.’
Soon she could bear it no longer. But in 1852 Krupp met the other essential relationship in his life: Prince Wilhelm admired a Krupp gun so much that he came to inspect the Essen factory and, as king, ordered 100 sixty-pound cannon. After Bismarck’s ‘blood and iron’ speech, Wilhelm sent him to Krupp, who would provide the iron. At the works, they dined together, Bismarck saying of Napoleon, ‘What a stupid man he is.’ When Krupp designed a breech-loading cannon, Wilhelm and Bismarck bought it, but so did Russia, Britain, Austria. ‘We must,’ wrote Krupp, ‘put all our energy into serving Prussia.’ Bismarck waited to use his new guns.
In November 1863, the death of a Danish king enabled Bismarck to exploit a traditional dynastic puzzle. Denmark claimed the German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. In January 1864, Bismarck formed a Germanic alliance with Franz Josef to defeat Denmark, each occupying one of the duchies. Bismarck appreciated a moment of felicitous conjunction: Russia was won over by Prussian acquiescence in the crushing of the Polish rebellion; Britain was distracted by India, and France by Mexico.
Bismarck briefed Bleichröder to inform James de Rothschild in Paris that ‘The intimacy with Austria had reached its term. A chill will follow.’ Bismarck visited Napoleon in Biarritz, vaguely dangling bits of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Rhineland, but nothing was agreed. Napoleon thought Belgium ‘a ripe pear which one day will fall into our mouth’, but Bismarck compared him to ‘an innkeeper holding out his hand for a tip’. The emperor was ‘a sphinx without a riddle’. King Wilhelm received Krupp, warning him not to sell guns to Austria: ‘Come to your senses while there’s still time.’
Bismarck engineered the confrontation with Austria. Eugénie encouraged Napoleon to mobilize but, wearied by the corrosion of power and bamboozled by Bismarck, he saw no need.* The Habsburgs had been the ‘presiding power’ of the German Confederation, the replacement for the Holy Roman Empire, since 1815 (with a short interlude during the years 1848–9). To defend this paramountcy, Franz Josef confidently went to war against Prussia, backed by the kings of Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, all fielding Krupp cannon. Prussia’s needle gun was superior to Austria’s Lorenz gun, but astonishingly the Habsburg believed in his slower guns because rapid fire encouraged soldiers to waste ammunition. The Prussian chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, had noted the use of railways by Napoleon III, then by the Americans in the civil war, and mastered their use himself.
On 3 July 1866 at Sadowa (Königgrätz in Czechia), Moltke routed the Austrians.* Bismarck ended Austria’s nominal German leadership and created a North German Confederation, headed by King Wilhelm of Prussia, who wanted to carve up the Habsburg empire. But after a tantrum, tears and screaming, Bismarck won his point, predicting that Austria would become Prussia’s natural ally: indeed, House Habsburg became its chief ally until 1918.
Bismarck relished ‘playing a game of cards with a million-dollar stake he didn’t really possess. Now the wager had been won, he felt depressed.’ Later he was elated, banging his desk: ‘I’ve beaten them all! ALL!’ Krupp too had mixed feelings – one of his cannon had exploded, killing its gunners. After a semi-breakdown, not helped by his wife’s separate, luxurious life and affairs, he offered to swap the old guns for new, demonstrating a new generation of guns to an enthusiastic Wilhelm and Bismarck.
The defeat at Sadowa was a sign for Napoleon to exercise caution, especially as the French were watching the Mexican endgame. Maximilian withdrew to Santiago de Querétaro, where Juárez besieged him. When he attempted to break out, Maximilian was betrayed. Juárez sentenced him to death. ‘I always wanted to die on a morning like this,’ murmured Maximilian as he was taken out before 3,000 troops. He boldly addressed them: ‘Mexicans! Men of my class and race [he meant the Habsburgs] are created by God to be the happiness of nations or their martyrs. Long live Mexico!’ Refusing a blindfold, he choreographed his martyrdom with two of his generals on either side of him like Christ. Franz Josef said nothing about his brother’s death except that he would be missed at the next shoot, where ‘we may still look forward to some good sport’.
