Bismarck, Realpolitik, and Prussia's wars of unification (1862-1866)

Germany's equivalent turning point came with the appointment of Otto von Bismarck, a Prussian Junker and diplomat, as minister-president of Prussia on 23 September 1862, at the height of a constitutional conflict in which the liberal-majority Landtag had refused to fund King William I's army reform. On 30 September 1862, barely a week into office, Bismarck told the Landtag's Budget Commission that "the great questions of the age are not decided by speeches and majority resolutions... but by iron and blood," a phrase that gave its name to the diplomatic and military method — "blood and iron" — through which he would pursue unification. Governing without a parliamentary budget between 1862 and 1866 under his "theory of the gap" (Lückentheorie), Bismarck applied what the publicist Ludwig von Rochau had recently termed "Realpolitik": the subordination of ideological principle to the calculated pursuit of Prussian state interest.