Actually Bismarck lost in his efforts against the Catholic church, which was a surprising failure by someone considered perhaps the best diplomat of the 19th Century.
Though he arranged the Franco-Prussian war to dethrone the belligerent yet incompetent Napoleon III, he did so in such a way to make the war a surgical effort that would be quick and relatively painless.
Napoleon III was humiliated in Mexico, invading and conquering it only to look across the border to see 50,000 battle hardened Union army troops under the command of generals Sheridan and Grant. Two men you did not want to pick fights with.
So when the French army came home, Napoleon III started beating the drum against Germany. The Kaiser wanted to appease him, so sent him a telegram that was intercepted and rewritten by Bismarck, calling Napoleon III the equivalent of a “sissy boy”.
In a really stupid move, Napoleon III sent a few French military units to invade Germany to abuse Germans, not realizing that the fully prepared German army was waiting just over the border, and were in Paris within days. And Napoleon III was out of a job.
But after pulling off this huge coup, Bismarck begged and pleaded with the Kaiser to just pull out of France, and everything would be better. But the Kaiser decided to punish France by taking the territory of Alsace-Lorraine, which set the stage for World War I.
Grant did not want to send Sheridan to the boarder. That was insisted upon by Lincoln who had this paranoia about euro intervention into our civil war...some factual.
But Grant sent em, and the rest is history. WT Sherman, told a couple of Englishmen when in Savanna, that he would have liked to invade England and teach the nobility there a lesson they’d never forget. Sherman, could be called the father of the blitzkrieg in a way. The man was a loose cannon, yet at his funeral, Joe Johnston attended as a good friend.
Grant feared no man in the southern army like he feared Joe Johnston. Grant explains all of it in his civil war memoirs. And, he basically laughed at Napoleon III.
Grant was the greatest general this nation ever produced..my opinion I know, but read his books and one can not come to any other conclusion.
That depends on the definition of winning. Bismarck, the author of Realpolitik did have to back off on some of his anti-clericalism due to a perception that the socialists had become a greater threat. To combat the socialists he needed support from the Center Party which he received. However, the May Laws (Falk Laws) were not fully repealed until after Bismarck's death so, say he lost is not entirely accurate.