History: Prussia's Iron Chancellor against the Catholic Church

A Kulturkampf primer

Michael Cook

The best-known culture war was fought in 19th Century Germany, pitting Prussia's Iron Chancellor against the Catholic Church. The Iron Chancellor lost.

• Throughout the 19th century Church and State were often at loggerheads, even in European countries with centuries of Catholic tradition behind them.
• Enlightenment progressives everywhere favoured a radically secularised society in which religion played only a marginal role. In Prussia, the forerunner state to modern Germany, this problem burst a gasket in 1871.
• Bismarck’s life’s work was the unification, through conquest and treaty, of an archipelago of German-speaking states (with the conspicuous exception of Austria). In 1870 Prussia humiliated France in the Franco-German War. 
• Bismarck’s army took Emperor Napoleon III prisoner and starved Paris into submission. The Prussians did a triumphal march through the streets of Paris. Bismarck was on a roll. In 1871 the hold-out states of southern Germany joined a Prussian-led federation with Kaiser Wilhelm I as head of state. 
• In many ways this prosperous new country was authoritarian, but it was also a democracy with active political parties.

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