Editing Industrial Revolution (section)

==The Unification of Germany== 
{{topquote|The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.|Otto von Bismarck about the unification of Germany}} 

One of the aftereffects of Napoleon's brief stint into making France the all-encompassing superpower of Europe was that he motivated quite a lot of people to identify themselves with their nation instead of families or rulers. The place where this nascent idea of nationalism reverberated the most were the German states, which had been notorious for their disunity since the age of Charlemagne. Liberal and nationalist ideas that sought to unify Germany into one nation ultimately culminated in a series of revolutions that all failed until Prussia, under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck (a man with a political genius as massive as his mustache), kicked the Austrians out of the German territories and won a war against France in 1871. 

The Franco-Prussian War, incidentally, had not a lot to do with Germany in itself. The southern German states (Hesse, Württemberg, Baden and Bavaria) that were still independent from Prussia at this point, leaned towards Austria. Instead it was about... Spain. Spain? What does fucking Spain have to do with Germany? Well Spain had a lot of issues at the time, the most pressing of which that it was a colonial power with no monarchy; their previous queen had been removed from power by a coup. After [[Blam|order had been restored]], the question remained whose dynasty should ascend to the Spanish throne. One of the proposed candidates was Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a scion of a branch of the Prussian royal family that remained Catholic. France was very paranoid about being outmaneuvered by the Germans and sought to prevent that, but Bismarck carefully manipulated a series of events, including the careful redacting and publication of a diplomatic telegram to make it seem as if the French had pressured the Prussian King to withdraw Leopold's candidacy for the Spanish throne (when in reality Leopold had already declined to Wilhelm) to lure France into a war with Prussia and the German states. [[Just as planned|And it worked.]] The South Germans were outraged, and the French found themselves faced with a Hobson's choice: either they could go to war or suffer severe diplomatic embarrassment at home and abroad. The following conflict saw the French being thoroughly curbstomped within eight months as the Prussians outmaneuvered and outgunned them again and again. Massive conscription after the majority of professional soldiers fell into Prussian captivity at Metz and Sedan did little to alleviate the problems. To add insult to injury, the Germans proclaimed their new Empire in Versailles, the old seat of the French kings, driving a wedge between France and Germany that would not be overcome until the 1960s.   

The unification of Germany marked a massive shift in the balance of the European powers. The weakest power in the European concert (Prussia) suddenly became the strongest on the continent, with a massive population, a disciplined and modern army that ground every enemy it faced into the dirt like they were nothing, and a huge industrial base that was kicked into overdrive once the multitude of national barriers between the small German dukedoms were abolished (also helped by the reparations France had to pay to the Germans as well as the capture of Alsace-Lothringia and its rich deposits of ore). It grew so fast and rapidly that only in the span of 30 years, it managed to surpass the production levels of steel and coal of every other imperial power in the world and singlehandedly pioneered large-scale industrial chemical production with inventions like the Haber process for synthesizing ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen (invaluable and irreplaceable in anything that has to do with anorganic chemistry, like most of the fertilizers used in contemporary farming). In general the German Empire was at the forefront of what's called the "Second Industrial Revolution" of the late 19th century.

The Germans, being late to the party as far as imperialism was concerned, wanted a piece of that big fat colonial cake that they felt were owed and used their industrial and military leverage to apply massive pressure to the rest of Europe. This, combined with the inherent semi-feudal social order that had persisted in Prussia since the 1600s and the rampant militarism of German society, created a very aggressive nationalist machismo which ultimately contributed a lot to the crisis that led to World War One with all of its cataclysmic consequences. Nearly all negative stereotypes people associate with Germany to this day, like militarism, brutishness, blind obedience, lack of humour, strict workplace discipline, punctuality, and being unemotional come from this particular era. The culture that this attitude bred eventually led to the mindset that gave rise to the Nazis after Germany's defeat in World War I and only started to fizzle out after the old elites of the German Empire were permanently removed from power after World War II forced the Germans to reinvent themselves and their nation.