The public of the whole universe will remember that at the time of the Emperor Frederick's death the great question first arose as to who was the initiator (or inventor) of the "United German Empire," and from all sides poured forth the declarations of eye and ear witnesses; this was the moment of the Gessellen-incident, and the outbreak of hostility between Prince Bismarck and Baron de Rozzenbach and Gustav Freitag, the novelist, and the celebrated jurisconsult for whose illegal imprisonment the high-handed chancellor had later to atone. But there apparently resulted from all these disputes that, as the glory of "priority of invention" was so eagerly sought for, there must have been an "inventor!" That was in reality the point on which Sybel "spoke," and he therefore entitled his "history" that of the "_Creation of the German United Empire, by William_ I."
This it was not; but this was at the same time the view it suited the vanity of the French nation to take of it; accordingly, Sybel's theory was rapidly accepted, and French public opinion did its utmost to cause the unity of Germany, as recognized in 1871, to be regarded as an accident, the creation of one man, promoted, for that matter ungrudgingly, to the rank of the "greatest European statesman," but whose work, being that of an individual, and therefore accidental, might quite conceivably be eventually undone. Sybel's theory, being official and Bismarckian, puts forth in truth the French conception, and is, as a matter of fact, the very opposite of the national German one.
The Germans who agreed with Sybel were the men of the old regime, with far less, be it said, of the "cute" chancellor himself, than of Marshal Moltke, the chancellor being far more distant from the materialism of the "Grand Fritz" with his "big battalions" than were the veterans (however glorious) of the drilled and disciplined Prussian army. Bismarck was divided between two creeds: he knew too much psychology to believe solely in the supremacy of pipeclay, but he was at the same time not averse to the creation of a revived German empire by his own genius.
Hence chiefly the confusion; for men's minds were confused,--in France determinedly, and even in Germany, (owing to the still enduring force of obsolete opinions and antiquated habits of thought and action) uncertain.