Who was Otto von Bismarck?
Germany’s Iron Chancellor
One of the giants of 19th-century European history, Bismarck is undoubtedly someone who deserves to be called a great man of history.
Born in 1815 in the Kingdom of Prussia, Bismarck was born into a rapidly changing world.
Only three months after Bismarck was born, Napoleon Bonaparte, the dominant figure of Europe’s early 19th century, was defeated definitely at the Battle of Waterloo.
With Napoleon defeated and sent into his final exile, the 1815 borders of Europe more or less resembled what the continent looked like in 1789 when the French Revolution broke out. In reality, beneath the surface, nothing was as it seemed.
Thanks to two decades of French conquests and occupation of much of Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, and even Poland, the ideas of the revolution spread far and wide. Though the conservative monarchies were now back in control, a rising class of urban liberal middle class, reformist aristocrats, and rapidly expanding working class was diametrically opposed to the old order.
Resentment was suppressed for decades, but it eventually broke into the open in the form of the 1848–49 revolutions, a series of events that shook the old order to its core.
