William I

William I

William I (1797-1888) was king of Prussia from 1861 to 1888 and emperor of Germany from 1871 to 1888. He was the first of the three Hohenzollern rulers of the German Empire of 1871-1918.

Born in Berlin on March 22, 1797, William I was the second son of Prussian king Frederick William III and Queen Luise. William spent much of the Napoleonic Wars as a somewhat sickly refugee in Konigsberg, Memel, and St. Petersburg. He participated in the 1813-1814 War of Liberation, gaining an Iron Cross for action at Bar-sur-Aube and being promoted to general major on his twenty-first birthday.

After a brief "forbidden romance" with Princess Elizabeth Radziwill, in 1829 William wed the lively Princess Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, with whom he enjoyed a happy marriage despite habitual arguments. William became heir presumptive in 1840 on the accession of his childless brother, Frederick William IV. This fact, and his military conservatism, made William the "Cartridge Prince," whom the revolutionaries of 1848 hounded from Berlin to a diplomatic refuge in England. He returned in a few months, advocating order and enforcing it in an 1849 "campaign" against rebels in the Palatinate, where military administration brought William promotion to field marshal in 1854.

William became deputy sovereign in 1857 and regent in 1858 for his expiring brother, whom he succeeded on Jan. 2, 1861. The authoritarian policy and advisers of the new reign soon created a constitutional crisis. William sought to conscript a larger regular army to support his foreign policy, while pursuing a progressive "new era" in domestic politics. This united only the Landtag opponents of the military budget. War Minister Albrecht von Roon persuaded William to appoint Otto von Bismarck as minister president in 1862, and thenceforth Bismarck's skill as a diplomatist soon made him so indispensable that his right to advise William became in effect a power to rule in the King's name.

William presided over, without directing or controlling, the political and military conflicts by which Bismarck and chief of staff Count Moltke drove Austria from the German Confederation (1866) and then led the remaining German states to victory over Napoleon III (1870). The united Deutsches Reich under Kaiser William was acclaimed at Versailles on Jan. 18, 1871, during the siege of Paris. William regarded his new title as a burden of doubtful value and complained that "it is very difficult being Kaiser under a Chancellor like Bismarck." However, Bismarck was kept as chancellor to the end of William's long reign.

The new German Empire needed more modern institutions of government than the old kaiser could develop or tolerate. This proved a misfortune for his successors, Frederick III and William II, as well as for Germany, but William's generation was content to understand "German freedom" simply as national independence. The diplomatic effort to preserve this by averting another war consumed the old king's declining years. The last hours before his death on March 9, 1888, were expended in royal monologues on foreign policy, and the dying monarch rejected suggestions that he rest with the ironic retort, "I have no time to be tired now."

Further Reading

A full-length study of William I in English is Paul Wiegler, William the First (1927; trans. 1929). See also Walter H. Nelson, The Soldier Kings (1970), and Theo Aronson, The Kaisers (1971). For historical background see Golo Mann, The History of Germany since 1789 (trans. 1968), and Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 1840-1945 (1969). □