Latest / The History of Germany: Kingdoms, War, and Rebuilding Europe — Fexingo History / Bismarck's Constitution: How Germany Was Engineered
Transcript
- Lucas: For anyone coming with us through these conversations about 19th-century Germany — you know Bismarck gets all the credit for unification. But what's less talked about is the constitution he basically engineered in 1871. The Verfassung des Deutschen Reiches didn't just happen; it was a carefully built machine. Luna: Was it based on anything earlier? Lucas: Yes — the North German Confederation's constitution from 1867. Bismarck essentially took that blueprint, tweaked it for the newly unified empire, and sold it to the southern states. The key was balancing power between the monarch, the federal states, and a parliament elected by universal male suffrage — which was actually pretty radical for the time. Luna: Universal male suffrage in 1871? That's earlier than Britain. Lucas: Exactly. Bismarck wasn't a democrat — far from it — but he saw that giving ordinary men the vote would undercut the liberals. He calculated that the rural and Catholic populations would back the monarchy. And for a while, he was right. The Reichstag could be elected, but it had limited power over the government. Lucas: The real power lay with the Bundesrat — the federal council representing the 25 states. Prussia dominated it, of course, with 17 out of 58 votes. And the chancellor was appointed by the Kaiser, not the parliament. So you have this hybrid: a democratically elected lower house that can't actually make or break a government. Luna: So the Reichstag could debate and pass laws, but not choose the chancellor? Lucas: Correct. The chancellor answered to the Kaiser, not the Reichstag. And the Kaiser could dissolve the Reichstag whenever he wanted — with the chancellor's advice, but still. This was baked in. There was no vote of no confidence. So the executive branch was essentially unaccountable to the legislature. Lucas: But here's where it gets clever — and dangerous. Article 68 of the constitution allowed the Kaiser to declare a 'state of siege' in any part of the empire if public security was threatened. That suspended civil liberties. And it was used repeatedly against socialists and labour movements. Luna: That sounds like a permanent emergency button. Lucas: It was. And it didn't require parliamentary approval. The constitution also left military matters largely outside civilian control. The army swore allegiance directly to the Kaiser, not to the state or the constitution. So you have a 'state within a state'. Luna: A quick honest thing — a handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what funds making this many of these. Lucas: Yeah, it's not a big ask. If the show's part of your week, that link's there. Keeps us ad-free and digging into these details. Luna: So back to the constitution — what about the budget? Didn't the Reichstag have to approve military spending? Lucas: It did, and that created a huge conflict in the 1860s — the Prussian constitutional crisis. Bismarck famously governed without a legal budget for four years. But after 1871, the constitution included a loophole: if the Reichstag and Bundesrat couldn't agree on the budget, the previous year's budget remained in effect. So the executive could just keep spending. Lucas: And for the military specifically, Bismarck introduced the Septennat — a seven-year military budget in 1874. The Reichstag could vote yes or no, but once approved, it was locked in for seven years. That took the sting out of annual budget fights. Luna: Seven years? That's a huge concession from parliament. Lucas: It was. The liberals got some oversight, but Bismarck got stability. And he played the national unity card — 'Germany's security can't be left to annual squabbling.' It worked. The Reichstag passed it. Lucas: Now, one more structural feature: the chancellor was also the Bundesrat's chairman — the Bundeskanzleramt. So Bismarck sat at the intersection of federal and executive power. He could propose legislation in the Bundesrat, then push it through the Reichstag. And he could dissolve the Reichstag if it blocked him. Luna: So he had his finger on every lever. Lucas: He did. But the constitution had one major weakness: it was built around Bismarck's personal political genius. After he was gone, the system relied on a strong chancellor and a restrained Kaiser. Wilhelm II was neither restrained nor wise, and the constitution had no mechanism to check him. Luna: So the 1871 constitution set up the problems that would explode in 1918. Lucas: Exactly. The Weimar Republic later tried to fix some of these issues — proportional representation, a stronger Reichstag — but they kept the Article 48 emergency powers, which became Hitler's legal path to dictatorship. So the 1871 design casts a very long shadow. Luna: There's a direct line from Article 68 to Article 48. Lucas: There is. And that's why understanding the 1871 constitution isn't just academic — it's the skeleton of modern German political history. The federal structure, the role of the chancellor, the tension between democracy and authoritarianism — it's all there from the start. Luna: It's interesting that Bismarck, of all people, gave Germans the vote. Lucas: He gave it but he also circumscribed it. He wanted a parliament that could be a safety valve, not an engine. And for thirty years, it worked beautifully for him. But it left a constitutional monarchy that was neither fully constitutional nor fully democratic — a hybrid that couldn't survive without a steady hand at the tiller.