It was in 1862 that Bismarck was called upon by the King to take up the post of Premier, a position which was to make him in a few years the most powerful statesman of Europe. At the ending of the Franco-Prussian War, on January 18, 1871, in the Palace of Versailles, it was the power of Bismarck that placed the imperial crown upon the head of the new Emperor, William I. of Germany. The union of German States against which the Chancellor had fought in years gone by, was now the creature of his own making. The time was propitious, France, Austria and the Papacy were all humbled. Prussia had become one of the Great Powers. If Bismarck had rested there, his name would have been greeted with the accumulated blessings of all the German people, even though all these triumphs had been won by the way of deceit, brutality and an absolute disregard of all the promptings of justice and humanity. That Bismarck had been preparing for his persecution of the Catholics is sufficiently proven from documentary evidence, although after 1888 he spent much time and effort to disclaim his part in the Kulturkampf. The Crown Prince of Germany in his diary of the date of October 24, 1870, wrote: "Bismarck related to my brother-in-law that immediately after the war he would enter upon the campaign against infallibility." Again, the Abbe Majunke, the eminent historian of the Kulturkampf, published in the _Historico Political Papers_ of Munich, a sensational article wherein he proved from existing documents that Bismarck was meditating the Kulturkampf before the opening of the Council: "The notes gathered together by Poschinger demonstrate that as early as 1850 the adversary of Windthorst has been the principal instigator of the Bavarian Kulturkampf," a fact which argued that he was the real instigator of the late Prussian persecution. Again Arnim, the former ambassador to Rome, shows that the Chancellor was projecting the conflict against infallibility at least while the Council was going on. Again, on September 13, 1870, Bismarck remarked to the deputy Werle, Mayor of Rheims: "When we have disposed of Catholicism, they (i. e. the Latin nations) will not be long in disappearing." All these and other evidences remain to show that the mind of Bismarck had been meditating the extermination of the Catholic religion before the actual hostilities began. His part in the conflict itself will be shown in discussing its events. In 1887, he made his peace with Pope Leo XIII., from whom he received the Grand Cross of the Order of Christ, and died in 1898, after witnessing the final collapse of the Kulturkampf and acknowledging its utter failure to accomplish the the end it had in view.