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The last French invasion was the invasion of another idea: revolution. When Paris mobs overthrew King Louis-Philippe in 1848, radicals and nationalists all over Europe took heart. The Italians rose against their Habsburg overlords; and even in dormant Germany, crowds began marching through the streets of Berlin, Vienna, Dresden. The armies of Germany's princes eventually suppressed these demonstrations, but not before liberals organized a constituent assembly, which met in Frankfurt and drafted an all-German constitution. The legislators decided that they could put their ideas into practice only by offering the crown of a united Germany to King Frederick William IV of Prussia. But he considered himself King of Prussia by the grace of God, and scorned any crown offered him by people or parliament.
The members of the confederation still met in Frankfurt, and the Habsburg delegates still exerted unofficial leadership, but the young Prussian delegate determined that this must be changed. "Before very long," Bismarck wrote back to Berlin, 'we shall have to fight for our lives against Austria . . . because the progress of events in Germany has no other issue." Prussia's King William I appointed Bismarck Minister-President in 1862, and within four years, Bismarck was ready for a showdown with Austria. Prussia's chief of staff, Count Helmuth von Moltke, had revived the army of Frederick the Great, making it once again Europe's best. Moltke attacked the Austrians and cut them to pieces. Germany's three centuries of intermittent civil war between north and south, Protestant and Catholic, Hohenzollern and Habsburg, were now over.
Bismarck was convinced, and probably rightly, that France would never permit a united Germany, so he provoked Emperor Napoleon III into a misguided declaration of war. Moltke invaded France with 300,000 men, trapped the French at Sedan and captured the Emperor and 100,000 of his men. When an improvised government in Paris proclaimed the Third Republic and vowed to continue the war, Moltke insisted on besieging Paris. By now it seemed clear to the German princes who had followed Prussia into the war that their future lay in a united Germany under Prussian leadership. Bismarck artfully arranged to have William crowned Kaiser (Caesar) in January of 1871 in the palace of Versailles, that bastion of the French kings, while the hungry citizens of nearby Paris endured the Prussian siege.
For the next 20 years Bismarck used all his craft and guile to maintain the peace among Europe's constantly maneuvering rulers. But his Reich was deeply undemocratic: he despised the legislators of the Reichstag, and was not responsible to them, but only to the Kaiser, whom he bullied and cajoled. Everyone expected that when the aged William finally died, his relatively liberal and high-minded son Frederick would lead the empire into a more enlightened era. But when William did die, in 1888, Frederick was already mortally ill with throat cancer, and so the throne soon passed to his temperamental and bellicose son William II, then 29, of whom his own mother once said, "My son will be the ruin of Germany."