Bismarck’s form of National Socialism ultimately succeeded beyond his intentions in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and Germany’s Götterdämmerung. His successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II, followed more reactionary policies, which only led to the end of the Romanov dynasty in 1918 and its replacement with an equally coercive Communist regime.

Tsar Alexander was rewarded for his bold reform by being disemboweled by a bomb thrown by a Socialist. Of the three, however, the author regards Lincoln’s revolution as the more successful in the struggle between human rights and government coercion.

Both Lincoln and Alexander were assassinated, while Bismarck was relieved of his office by Kaiser Wilhelm II, depriving Germany of what could have been a moderating counterbalance to the kaiser’s course toward World War I. The end was tragic for all three of Beran’s subjects. Bismarck, meanwhile, established a militaristic state in Prussia that in the course of three wars would form modern Germany-and inadvertently lay the groundwork for National Socialism and two more world conflicts. In January 1863, amid a war over central government control and states’ rights, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation officially involved slavery in the Union’s war efforts, a measure almost as unpopular in the North as it was in the South. In February 1861, Alexander overrode the objections of Russia’s aristocracy to free the serfs from their state of feudal servitude. All three statesmen transformed their respective nations with acts that at the time were regarded as extremely radical. Beran puts the life and times of Abraham Lincoln on a parallel course with those of two other notable contemporaries: Tsar Alexander II of Russia and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Prussia. Forge of Empires: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, 1861-1871īy Michael Knox Beran, Free Press, New York, 2007, 496 pages, $30.Īmerican audiences tend to put the decade in which the Civil War took place in a vacuum, but as author Michael Knox Beran shows in Forge of Empires, the global stage witnessed several other far-reaching events in the 1860s that were perhaps just as significant.

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