The “Iron Chancellor” is often credited with saying that the secrets of the legislative process are unlikely to please the average person. We checked the reliability of this attribution.

A comparison of lawmaking and the process of making sausages is presented as a quote from Bismarck in a variety of sources - from collections with aphorisms to the portal Germania-online, which was created by the German Foreign Ministry and tells foreigners about Germany. The phrase has also become popular on social networks - users attribute it to the German politician Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms. The quote in one form or another has become widespread not only in Russia. For example, in 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron commented his negotiations with American leader Donald Trump as follows: “As Bismarck said, if we told people what sausages were made of, they would hardly eat them.” Sometimes the expression is attributed to another politician - British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (at least a selection of his photographs taken by Kommersant, entitled very similar saying).

It is significant that the phrase being tested does not have a “canonical” version. In different sources you can find more than a dozen slightly different formulations: for example, “Laws are like sausages, it’s better not to see how they are made” or “Anyone who knows how laws and sausages are made in Germany will never be able to sleep peacefully.” Exists and a variant in which "sausage" is replaced with "sausage". It is alarming that this alleged statement by the Chancellor is not mentioned in authoritative sources like collections quotes on the website of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation, an organization that studies the politician’s legacy.

The earliest mention of the tested phrase is precisely as Bismarck's statements by our colleagues from The Quote Investigator project discovered in the 1933 edition (“Iron Chancellor” died back in 1898). Author of the textbook "Government in the United States" wrote: “I think it was Bismarck who said that a man who wants to maintain his respect for sausages and laws should not see how they are made. In the case of laws, knowledge of how they are made can increase our respect for them and their creators; be that as it may, we can at least express our dissatisfaction intelligently.” As you can see, at that time the attribution was not yet unambiguous, although, according to the results of a study by The Quote Investigator, the expression began to be presented as a Bismarck quote a quarter of a century later.

Quote researcher Fred Shapiro discoveredthat for the first time a phrase similar to that attributed to Bismarck appeared during the life of the politician, only its author was a different person. In 1869, The Daily Cleveland Herald quoted lawyer and man of letters John Godfrey Sachs: “Laws, like sausages, cease to command respect in proportion to our knowledge of how they are prepared.” The Quote Investigator confirmed this finding, although found a quote in a source published two days earlier in that issue of the Cleveland newspaper.