140 years ago German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck signaled the start of his legal anti-Catholic campaign by appointing the noted anti-cleric Adalbert Falk as Prussian Minister of Culture. Historians have never agreed on why the usually pragmatic Bismarck launched this attack [soon called a Kulturkampf] but one reason certainly was as a ploy to woo the National Liberals, the largest single party in the Reichstag. German liberals, like most european liberals at that time stood united in seeing the Roman Catholic Church as an outdated medieval survival and its papacy as the enemy of modernity with its Syllabus and its infallability dogma.
So the next few years saw a raft of laws, expelling the Jesuits and many Catholic religious orders, inserting government control over the education and placement of priests, secularizing education, etc. At one stormy session of the Reichstag a defiant Bismarck shouted: "I will not go to Canossa."
Indeed he did not, but he quickly began to have doubts. German Lutherans, the natural supporters of the Prussian monarchy, grew increasingly concerned that this climate would hurt all religions. As one observed "It is a bad thing when the state punishes actions that are considered as a matter of conscience,... causing profound injury to the moral consciousness." The liberals were proving troublesome partners and the Catholic party grew in votes. Most importantly Bismarck by 1878 spotted a much more serious threat, the rise of a Marxist Socialist party based on a growing working class created by industrialization.
Unlike Emperor Henry he did not have to go to Canossa. A new Pope, the great Leo XIII, offered tokens of openness. Soon the Kulturkampf laws began to fade and then vanish, but the psychological damage had been done to all sides.