Unification of Germany

The unification of Germany was completed on 18 January 1871, when King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, creating the German Empire out of the previously fragmented collection of German states under Prussian leadership. The unification was engineered chiefly by the Prussian minister-president Otto von Bismarck through a deliberate sequence of wars that isolated and defeated Prussia's rivals for German leadership: the Second Schleswig War against Denmark in 1864, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 that excluded Austria from German affairs, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, whose victory rallied the remaining southern German states into the new empire. The proclamation, staged deliberately on French soil in the aftermath of France's defeat, was both a diplomatic humiliation for France and a powerful symbolic assertion of the new German state's power. The resulting empire immediately became the dominant military and, within a few decades, industrial power on the European continent, reshaping the balance of power among the European great powers into the twentieth century.