Bismarck built the first welfare state mainly to undercut the socialists
The Iron Chancellor who unified Germany through three short wars also created the world's first welfare state, less from compassion than as a tactic against his socialist rivals. Before all that, the young Bismarck opposed German unification, fought a duel, and nearly wrecked his early career chasing two English women.
Bismarck was born on 1 April 1815 at Schönhausen, a family estate west of Berlin, to a Junker landowner and former officer and a well-educated mother from a family of civil servants. He grew up in rural Pomerania, studied law at Göttingen and Berlin, and spoke English, French, Italian, Polish and Russian. Though he cultivated the image of a rustic Junker in military uniform, the American historian John Lothrop Motley, a university friend, portrayed him as dashing, reckless and extraordinarily gifted. His legal training faltered after unauthorised leave spent pursuing Laura Russell and then Isabella Loraine-Smith. In 1847 he married Johanna von Puttkamer.
Elected to the new Prussian legislature in 1847, he made his name as a reactionary royalist who defended the divine right of kings. During the 1848 revolution he even tried to rally his peasants to march on Berlin. At first he resisted German unification, fearing Prussia would lose its independence. As envoy to the German Confederation in Frankfurt from 1851, he waged a battle of wills with the Austrian delegate, matching him cigar for cigar, and a quarrel there led to a duel with Georg von Vincke.
As minister president and foreign minister of Prussia from 1862 under Wilhelm I, he provoked quick wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Once Austria lost in 1866, he assembled a North German Confederation excluding it, and after beating France in 1870 he oversaw a unified German Empire under Prussia, serving as its first chancellor from 1871 to 1890. Balance-of-power diplomacy then kept Europe largely at peace, and though sceptical of overseas colonies he accepted some under public pressure.
At home he ruled autocratically through the bureaucracy and a sidelined Reichstag. His Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church backfired when Catholics formed the powerful Centre Party, so he dropped it and allied with them against the socialists. Dismissed by Wilhelm II, he retired to write memoirs. Nationalists raised monuments to him; historians praise his diplomacy while criticising his persecution of Catholics and authoritarian rule.
Source: Otto von Bismarck
