Did Bismarck talk about “drone officials”?

On social networks you can often find pictures with a quote from the German Chancellor about narrow-minded officials. We checked whether it is correct to attribute these words to Otto von Bismarck.

The full, widely circulated quote is: “Officials are drones who write laws that man cannot live by. Why do ministers have a constant salary and regardless of whether the population is living well or poorly? Now, if the salary quota for bureaucrats fluctuated up and down depending on the standard of living of the people, then these fools would write less laws and think more.” A mention of this phrase can be found at quote sites, V Facebook, Twitter And "LiveJournal", on "Odnoklassniki", Pikabu And "Yandex.Zene". The statement attributed to Bismarck is also found in printed sources - for example, in "The Big Book of Aphorisms, Worldly Wisdom and Quotes".

The first doubts about the authenticity of these words of Bismarck appear if you try to look for the phrase in foreign sources. Even on amateur and often quite low-quality resources, where quotes from famous people are collected, we will not find anything about “drone officials.” These words are not in English-speaking, neither in German-speaking Wikiquote, not to mention quote collections on the website of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation, an organization that studies the politician’s legacy. The closest in logic, but not in wording, is the phrase with the indisputable authorship of Bismarck: “With bad laws and good officials, you can rule, but with bad officials, even the best laws will not help us.” He wrote about this in 1850.

The absolute obscurity of the phrase we are interested in abroad suggests that it most likely has no direct relation to Bismarck. Moreover, there is a good chance that it was invented after the death of the chancellor and immediately in Russian. Apparently, the genealogy of the statement being verified is exactly this - its earliest mention can be found in the historical novel “The Battle of the Iron Chancellors” by Valentin Pikul, first published in 1977.

Although Pikul was one of the most popular authors of his time, he remained a writer, not a historian. Professional researchers often and a lot of it criticized precisely for historical inaccuracies and errors. We were unable to find information that when writing the fragment with the quote we are interested in, Pikul studied Bismarck’s diaries or correspondence. Most likely, the writer completely invented this phrase and did not see anything wrong with it, because more than once emphasizedthat the novel is not a historical study. However, millions of his readers in the USSR and the post-Soviet space, unfortunately, did not see this difference.

Incorrect quote attribution

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. V. Pikul. Battle of the Iron Chancellors
2. Otto von Bismarck Foundation. Quotes