When Diplomacy Fails Podcast

Get your tickets to Intelligent Speech online! Only $10 until 10 June, and catch your faves including me, as I do a Q&A!In this episode we examine the opening six months of Bismarck’s regime, and what a regime it was. It began, to Bismarck’s surprise, with a somewhat bumpy road. In the course of his first speech before the Landtag as Minister President, Bismarck discovered that his very reputation might prove the greatest danger to his premiership. In the course of this ‘Iron and Blood’ or blood and iron speech, Bismarck simply set forth the ideas and principles which he had always held dear, and which he had never tried to hide. Later, he would claim that he was trying to bring the deputies round to his way of thinking, in that they might see the need to place power in the Prussian army’s hand, thereby giving Prussia the chance to seize the day. To his contemporaries though, Bismarck’s speech was like the denunciation of Christian, moral principles, a rejection of the political independence which liberal