Abstract
Most texts dealing with the Austro-Prussian War stress the fact that while the Austrian army was made up of long-serving professionals, the Prussian army was the product of short-term compulsory military service. Thus, the Austrian army was made up mostly of soldiers from rural localities from the lower social classes, with a minimal level of education. Although this constituted a physically fit and easily moldable mass, in competition with the armies of citizen-soldiers of modernizing states this mass failed as an adequately functional force on modernizing and still more complex battlefield. Many writers attribute this fact as a heavy weight on the scales which, among other factors, tipped the balance towards a clear Prussian victory in the war of 1866. They then see confirmation of this causal link in the post-war reform of the Austrian (Austro-Hungarian) army, which also subsequently switched to a system of compulsory military service.
However, such conclusions are highly simplistic and over-reliant on the norm, whereas the practice was a much more complex and profound phenomenon. The reason why Prussian society was imbued with militarism and why "at Hradec Králové/Königgrätz, a Prussian teacher defeated an Austrian stableboy in kaiserrock" is far more complex than being caused by a mere signature on a legal decree. Context of this genesis of the resulting homogeneous body and well-functioning machine that was the Prussian army in the so-called Unification wars, its social structure and its ideological background are main topic of our contribution.