Otto von Bismarck

Bismarck was born in 1815 at Schönhausen, a noble family estate west of Berlin in Prussian Saxony. His father, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Bismarck (1771–1845), was a Swabian-descendant Junker estate owner and a former Prussian military officer; his mother, Wilhelmine Luise Mencken (1789–1839), was the well-educated daughter of a senior government official in Berlin whose family produced many civil servants along with academics. In 1816, the family moved to its Pomeranian estate, Kniephof (now Konarzewo, Poland), northeast of Stettin (now Szczecin), in the then-Prussian province of Farther Pomerania. There, Bismarck spent his childhood in a bucolic setting. Despite the assets they held, their financial affairs were average; Ferdinand's below adequate agricultural skills led to a decreased salary, with Bismarck having never obtained any significant wealth before unification, given the lack of such received from his father.

Bismarck had two siblings: his older brother Bernhard (1810–1893) and his younger sister Malwine (1827–1908). Others saw Bismarck as a typical backwoods Prussian Junker, an image that he encouraged by wearing military uniforms. However, he was well educated and cosmopolitan with a gift for conversation. Bismarck also knew English, French, Italian, Polish, and Russian.

Bismarck was educated at Johann Ernst Plamann's elementary school, and the Friedrich-Wilhelm and Graues Kloster secondary schools. From 1832 to 1833, he studied law at the University of Göttingen, where he was a member of the Corps Hannovera, and then enrolled at the University of Berlin (1833–1835). In 1838, while stationed as an army reservist in Greifswald, he studied agriculture at the University of Greifswald. At Göttingen, Bismarck befriended the American student John Lothrop Motley. Motley, who later became an eminent historian and diplomat while remaining close to Bismarck, wrote a novel in 1839, Morton's Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial, about life in a German university. In it he described Bismarck as a reckless and dashing eccentric, but also as an extremely gifted and charming young man.

Although Bismarck hoped to become a diplomat, he started his practical training as a lawyer in Aachen and Potsdam, and soon resigned, having first placed his career in jeopardy by taking unauthorised leave to pursue two English girls: first Laura Russell, niece of the Duke of Cleveland, and then Isabella Loraine-Smith, daughter of a wealthy clergyman. In 1838, Bismarck began a shortened compulsory military service in the Prussian Army; actively serving as a one-year volunteer before becoming an officer in the Landwehr (reserve). Afterwards he returned to run the family estates at Schönhausen on his mother's death in his mid-twenties.

Around age 30, Bismarck formed an intense friendship with Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff, newly married to one of his friends, Moritz von Blanckenburg. A month after her death, Bismarck wrote to ask for the hand in marriage of Marie's cousin, the noblewoman Johanna von Puttkamer (1824–1894); they were married at Alt-Kolziglow (modern Kołczygłowy) on 28 July 1847. Their marriage produced three children: Marie (b. 1847), Herbert (b. 1849), and Wilhelm (b. 1852). Johanna was a shy, retiring and deeply religious woman, although famed for her sharp tongue in later life.

Health and safety regulations

In 1884, the Federal Council issued safety regulations for match factories, followed by regulations for lead paint and lead sugar factories in 1886 and for cigar factories in 1888.

He married Johanna von Puttkamer in 1847. They had three children: Marie (b. 1848), Herbert (b. 1849) and Wilhelm (b. 1852).

Young politician

In 1847, Bismarck, aged thirty-two, was chosen as a representative to the newly created Prussian legislature, the Vereinigter Landtag. There, he gained a reputation as a royalist and reactionary politician with a gift for stinging rhetoric; he openly advocated the idea that the monarch had a divine right to rule. Two brothers, Ernst Ludwig and Leopold von Gerlach, fellow Pietist Lutherans whose ultra-conservative faction was known as the "Kreuzzeitung" — after their newspaper, the Neue Preußische Zeitung, so nicknamed because it featured an Iron Cross on its cover — arranged his selection.

In March 1848, Prussia faced a revolution (one of the revolutions of 1848 across Europe), which completely overwhelmed King Frederick William IV. The monarch, though initially inclined to use armed forces to suppress the rebellion, ultimately declined to leave Berlin for the safety of military headquarters at Potsdam. Bismarck later recorded that there had been a "rattling of sabres in their scabbards" from Prussian officers when they learned that the king would not suppress the revolution by force. He offered numerous concessions to the liberals: he wore the black-red-gold revolutionary colours (as seen on the flag of today's Germany), promised to promulgate a constitution, agreed that Prussia and other German states should merge into a single nation-state, and appointed a liberal, Gottfried Ludolf Camphausen, as Minister President.

Bismarck had at first tried to rouse the peasants of his estate into an army to march on Berlin in the king's name. He travelled to Berlin in disguise to offer his services but was instead told to make himself useful by arranging food supplies for the Army from his estates in case they were needed. The king's brother, Prince Wilhelm, had fled to England; Bismarck tried to get Wilhelm's wife Augusta to place their teenage son Frederick William on the Prussian throne in Frederick William IV's place. Augusta would have none of it, and detested Bismarck thereafter, despite the fact that he later helped restore a working relationship between Wilhelm and his brother the king. Bismarck was not yet a member of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the new Prussian legislature. The liberal movement perished by the end of 1848 amid internal fighting. Meanwhile, the conservatives regrouped, formed an inner group of advisers—including the Gerlach brothers, known as the "Camarilla"—around the king, and retook control of Berlin. Although a constitution was granted, its provisions fell far short of the demands of the revolutionaries.

In 1849, Bismarck was elected to the Landtag. At this stage in his career, he opposed the unification of Germany, arguing that Prussia would lose its independence in the process. He accepted his appointment as one of Prussia's representatives at the Erfurt Parliament, an assembly of German states that met to discuss plans for union, but he only did so to oppose that body's proposals more effectively. The parliament failed to bring about unification, for it lacked the support of the two most important German states, Prussia and Austria. In September 1850, after a dispute over the Electorate of Hesse (the Hesse Crisis of 1850), Prussia was humiliated and forced to back down by Austria (supported by Russia) in the so-called Punctation of Olmütz; a plan for the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership, proposed by Prussia's Foreign Minister Joseph von Radowitz, was also abandoned.

In 1851, Frederick William IV appointed Bismarck as Prussia's envoy to the Diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt. Bismarck gave up his elected seat in the Landtag but was appointed to the Prussian House of Lords a few years later. In Frankfurt, he engaged in a battle of wills with the Austrian representative Count Friedrich von Thun und Hohenstein. He insisted on being treated as an equal by petty tactics such as imitating Thun when Thun claimed the privileges of smoking and removing his jacket in meetings. This episode was the background for an altercation in the Frankfurt chamber with Georg von Vincke that led to a duel between Bismarck and Vincke with Carl von Bodelschwingh as an impartial party, which ended without injury.

Bismarck's eight years in Frankfurt were marked by changes in his political opinions, detailed in the numerous lengthy memoranda, which he sent to his ministerial superiors in Berlin. No longer under the influence of his ultraconservative Prussian friends, Bismarck became less reactionary and more pragmatic. He became convinced that to countervail Austria's newly restored influence, Prussia would have to ally herself with other German states. As a result, he grew to be more accepting of the notion of a united German nation. He gradually came to believe that he and his fellow conservatives had to take the lead in creating a unified nation to keep from being eclipsed. He also believed that the middle-class liberals wanted a unified Germany more than they wanted to break the grip of the traditional forces over society.

Bismarck also worked to maintain the friendship of Russia and a working relationship with Napoleon III's France, the latter being anathema to his conservative friends, the Gerlachs, but necessary both to threaten Austria and to prevent France from allying with Russia. In a famous letter to Leopold von Gerlach, Bismarck wrote that it was foolish to play chess having first put 16 of the 64 squares out of bounds. This observation became ironic, as after 1871, France indeed became Germany's permanent enemy, and eventually allied with Russia against Germany in the 1890s.

Bismarck was alarmed by Prussia's isolation during the Crimean War of the mid-1850s, in which Austria sided with Britain and France against Russia; Prussia was almost not invited to the peace talks in Paris, where Russia notably regained access to the Black Sea, much to his chagrin. In the Great Eastern Crisis of the 1870s, fear of a repetition of this turn of events would later be a factor in Bismarck's signing the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879.