It was harder still because Bismarck, making a wager on popular conservatism like his contemporaries Louis Napoleon and Benjamin Disraeli, introduced universal manhood suffrage for German national elections. The hybrid political system created in 1871, in which he served as both Prussian minister-president and chancellor of the new German empire, required a difficult balancing act.

The problems were partly of Bismarck's making. He remained in power for another 20 years, increasingly irascible and dictatorial, denouncing political opponents and sulking on his estate when things became too much. In his own words, if there was to be revolution, better to make it than to suffer it. Like Lampedusa's Tancredi in The Leopard, Bismarck took the view that 'for things to remain the same, everything must change'. Lothar Gall's outstanding biography 30 years ago called Bismarck a 'white revolutionary', who placed himself at the head of nationalist sentiment, destroyed the German confederation and subverted the international order to preserve the fundamentals of the Prussian monarchical state. They passed an indemnity bill that retrospectively sanctioned Bismarck's earlier breaches of the constitution.

The liberals who still denounced Bismarck on the eve of Prussian victory over Austria in 1866 now celebrated his political genius. Nine years and three wars later Austria had been excluded from German affairs, France defeated and a Prussian-dominated German nation state established with Wilhelm I as its emperor. Few thought he would last long some believed he had been appointed only to provoke a reaction that would open the way to military dictatorship. Jonathan Steinberg's readable new biography quotes a Prussian diplomat, Councillor von Zschock in Stuttgart, who wrote that Bismarck's very name caused 'profound hatred in the depth of the soul of every true friend of Prussia'. After contemplating abdication, the king instead summoned the 47-year-old Junker, a man reviled by liberals because of his violently reactionary statements, yet deeply distrusted by orthodox conservatives as an unprincipled political schemer.

His appointment was a desperate roll of the dice by King Wilhelm I, who faced constitutional crisis when parliament rejected a bill that increased the length of military service and reduced the role of the civilian reserve. O tto von Bismarck became minister-president of Prussia in September 1862.

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