Bismarck, Prince Otto Edward Leopold von (1815-1898), Prusso-German statesman, who was the architect and first chancellor (1871-1890) of the German Empire.
Bismarck was born on April 1, 1815, at Schönhausen, north-west of Berlin, the son of a landowning nobleman (Junker) and a prosperous bourgeois mother: his multifaceted background accounts for the blend of intellectual subtlety and Junker parochialism in his character. He studied law, and in 1836 entered government service. Unhappy in his subordinate post, he resigned a year later, took over the management of his family's run-down estates, and restored their profitability.
Driven by a strong sense of power, Bismarck entered politics in 1847. As a delegate to Prussia's first diet, he emerged as one of the most rigid conservatives; at the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848 he rushed to Berlin, urging King Frederick William IV to suppress the uprising. His advice was ignored, but his loyalty was rewarded by his appointment in 1851 as Prussia's representative to the German Confederation, a league of the 39 German states. In 1859 he became ambassador to Russia, and in 1862 he was posted to France.
Unification
That same year a bitter dispute between the Prussian government and Parliament over the size of the army reached an impasse. In 1861 Parliament had granted the government additional funds for reforms, but in 1862 it refused to do so without a reduction of compulsory military service from three to two years. King William I would not yield for fear that the draftees would be insufficiently imbued with conservative values; for that very reason, the liberal-dominated Parliament insisted on this concession.
In order to break the stalemate, Bismarck was named minister-president. He proceeded to collect the additional taxes on the basis of the 1861 budget, arguing that because the constitution did not provide for the case of an impasse he would have to apply the preceding year's budget. To justify the increase of the a