Europe: A History (132 page)
The rise of Prussia reached its critical momentum in the eighteenth century. It is generally interpreted in the light of Prussia’s later mission of unification in Germany. In reality, it occurred through the relendess pursuit of dynastic policies, which repeatedly divided the German world and which raised a kingdom possessing none of the characteristics of a latent national state. It was achieved through the creation of an administrative machine of marvellous efficiency, which enabled its rulers to maintain a standing army of disproportionate size. (In
terms of the ratio between professional soldiers and population, Prussia was thirty times more efficient than its neighbour, Poland-Lithuania.) The Prussian Excise (1680) made possible the upkeep of the Prussian army. The army was based on an aristocratic officer corps, and after 1733 on the cantonal system of peasant conscription,
[GOOSE-STEP]
Under Frederick III (r. 1688–1713) and Frederick-William I (r. 1713–40), the ‘drill-master of Europe’, the Hohenzollerns followed the same unscrupulous path laid down by the ‘Great Elector’ (see Chapter VII). In 1700 their electoral vote was sold to the Habsburgs in return for recognition of their own claim to kingship. In 1728 their accession to the Pragmatic Sanction was bought by the cession of Berg and Ravenstein. Fleet footwork in the alliances of the Spanish Succession and the Great Northern War resulted in the important acquisitions of Stettin and Western Pomerania. Sweden was only the latest to learn that it was no less dangerous having Prussia as an ally than as an enemy. The inimitable ‘Prussian spirit’ grew from a mixture of loyalty to the dynasty, of arrogance born of military prowess, and of justified pride in cultural and educational advances. Halle received the first Prussian university in 1694; Berlin, invigorated by a major influx of French Huguenots and Austrian Protestants, received its Royal Academy of Arts (1696) and its Royal Academy of Sciences (1700). An edict of 1717 looked to the improvement of public education.
Under Frederick the Great (r. 1740–86) Prussia unleashed the forces so carefully garnered by his predecessors. From Frederick’s opening sensation, the seizure of Austrian Silesia in 1740, war was the prime instrument of policy for a quarter of a century. Then, having brought his country to the brink of annihilation, Frederick turned to diplomatic brigandage, which in the first Partition of Poland finally brought the prize of a consolidated territorial base (see below),
[GROSSENMEER]
Frederick’s personality was one of the wonders of the age. It was formed under the lash of a brutal father, who had forced him in boyhood to watch the execution of his friend, Katte, and had imprisoned him for years in the fortress of Küstrin (Kostrzyn) on the Oder. Throughout the reign, the crash of cannon and the groans of the battlefield were mixed with the flights of the King’s flute and the chatter of the
philosophes
. ‘I was born too soon,’ Frederick once said, ‘but I have seen Voltaire.’ German historians have not been alone in praising his merits. Lord Acton called him ‘the most consummate practical genius’ that ever inherited a modern throne.
The wars and battles of Frederick the Great fill many volumes. They are among classics of historic warfare. After the two Silesian wars, 1740–2 and 1744–5, which formed part of the wider War of Austrian Succession and earned him the undying hatred of Maria Theresa, he retained the fruits of his aggression. At Mollwitz, Chotusitz, Hohenfriedberg, Frederick carried the day. In 1745 he occupied Prague. In the Seven Years War he reached the heights of glory and the depths of despair. It began with his attack on Saxony. Through Lobositz, Rossbách, Zorndorf, Leuthen, Kolin, Kunersdorf, Liegnitz, and Torgau, he brilliantly exploited his interior lines of communication, and repeatedly evaded his enemies’ attempts to
bring their overwhelming numbers to bear. At Rossbach, he triumphed with trifling losses. At Kunersdorf, he survived amidst scenes of carnage. In 1762, with the treasury empty, British subsidies stopped, and the Russians poised to take Berlin, he was saved by the death of the Russian Empress and an unexpected truce. Once again, at the Treaty of Hubertusburg (1763), he kept his winnings intact. ‘Hunde,’ he had once railed, when his guards had hesitated, ‘wollt ihr ewig leben?’ (dogs, do you wish to live forever?).
Under Frederick-William II (r. 1786–97) Prussia began to take a different course. The new King even risked an alliance with Poland-Lithuania. But the logic of the revolutionary era and of Russian power brought him back into line. At the second and the third Partitions of Poland, Prussia acquired both Danzig and Warsaw. By 1795 Berlin found itself ruling over a country that was 40 per cent Slav and Catholic, with a large Jewish community. It was one of the most dynamic melting-pots of Europe. Had this situation developed without interruption, it is hard to imagine what course German and Central European history might eventually have taken. As it was, old Prussia was to be overwhelmed by Napoleon; and the new Prussia which appeared in 1815 was to be a very different beast indeed.
If Prussia exemplified the successful pursuit of power in a small country, Russia exemplified a similar phenomenon on a heroic scale in Europe’s largest country. Frederick the Great himself was impressed. Of the Russians, he once remarked: ‘It will need the whole of Europe to keep those gentlemen within bounds.’
In the 149 years which separated the deaths of Alexei Mikhailovitch in 1676 and of Alexander I in 1825, the Romanovs raised the fortunes of their country from that of a nascent regional power to that of the invincible ‘gendarme of Europe’. Alexei, who had succeeded in the same decade as Louis XIV, was an obscure Muscovite prince of whom, at Versailles, little was even known; Alexander rode through Paris in triumph. During the intervening century and a half, scores of military campaigns were fought, largely with success; the Grand Duchy of Moscow was revamped as the ‘Empire of all the Russias’; the territory of the state engulfed a string of neighbouring countries; society and administration were subjected to root-and-branch reforms; the whole identity of the state and ruling nation was remodelled. For all who revelled in this exhibition of power, all the people and policies who made the transformation possible were by definition good and, as Klyuchevsky wrote of Peter the Great, ‘necessary’.
In autocracies the personality of the autocrat is no secondary factor, and in Russia two personalities stood out—those of Peter I (r. 1682–1725) and of Catherine II (r. 1762–96). Both were awarded the epithet of ‘Great’; both were larger than life, in physical stature, animal energy, and determination; and both have been eulogized for their undoubted contribution to Russia’s own greatness. In any overall judgement, however, whether about the ruler or the realm, one must wonder if size and brute strength alone can be taken as the test of greatness. Critics find no difficulty in finding traits that provoke shame rather than respect. Peter, in particular, was a moral monster. His lifelong participation in the debaucheries of the
Sobor
of Fools and Jesters—an obscene and blasphemous Russian variant of the English Hell-fire Club—may conceivably be dismissed as eccentric bad taste. But his personal involvement in gross and sadistic tortures, first revealed during the mass maltreatment of the rebel
streltsy
in 1697, cannot be counted a foible, even by the standards of his own day. His quaint delight in model ships and tin soldiers must be contrasted with his colossal disregard for the immense human suffering which attended many of his projects—such as the building of St Petersburg. A Tsar who could watch his innocent son and heir racked to death in the afternoon before attending a ribald court party in the evening was not far from Nero, even if he did change Russia ‘from non-being into being’.
GROSSENMEER
I
N
1785 Grossenmeer was a village in the Duchy of Oldenburg in northwest Germany, close to the border of the Netherlands and the newly acquired Prussian province of East Friesland. At that time it had a total population of 885, made up from 142 households, plus some 77 ‘paupers’ or other casual residents. An analysis of the village’s households reveals the following categories:
| Household type | No. % | |
| 1 Solitaries (e.g. widows) | 2 | 1.4 |
| 2. Non-conjugal household (co-resident siblings) | 1 | 0.7 |
| 3 Single-family households (parents and children) | 97 | 68.3 |
| 4. Extended family units (several generations and relatives) | 28 | 19.7 |
| 5. Multiple-family households (2 or more conjugal units co-resident) | 14 | 9.9 |
| | | |
| Total | 142 | 100 |
From this, it is evident that single-family households formed a clear majority (68 per cent), although extended and multiple-family households constituted a strong minority (30 per cent).
A senior scholar in the field chose this example to typify ‘that ill-defined European area where households tended to have the characteristics we have called ‘middle’. A ‘Four-Region Hypothesis’ was built on isolated examples of that sort. If Grossenmeer (1785) typified Europe’s ‘West-Central’ or ‘Middle’ region, the Essex village of Elmdon (1861) was taken to typify ‘the West’, Fagagna (1870), near Bologna, ‘the Mediterranean’, and Krasnoe Sobakino (1849), in Russia, ‘the East’. The geography is as suspect as the generalizing is grandiose.
The hypothesis was presented as the refinement of an older scheme, taken to be ‘universally accepted’, which had presumed to divide the traditional European family into two still simpler types—‘West’ and ‘East’. Grossenmeer was taken to be a variation on Elmdon, where no less than 73 per cent of households conformed to the simple type, whilst Fagagna was taken as a variation on Krasnoe Sobakino, where 86 per cent of households were of extended or multiple type.
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Comparative social history is an extremely fruitful subject. But it is an absolute principle that like must be compared with like. To compare a village in pre-industrial Germany with one at the industrializing height of Victorian England is dubious. Yet to typify the whole of another ‘ill-defined area’ called ‘Eastern Europe’ on the basis of one serf-bound village in the depths of Russia is, for ‘Western’ scholars, alarmingly typical. Diversity schematized is diversity denied,
[ZADRUGA]
Family history only came into its own in the 1970s. The English-language
Journal of Family History
dates from 1976. Hitherto, social scientists who studied family problems had apparently been ‘indifferent to the historical dimensions’, whilst social historians had been preoccupied with questions of class. Many scholars had assumed that a large, traditional, patriarchal form of household had existed in Europe since time immemorial, and hence that there was not much to study until the onset of modernization. The work of pioneers such as Frédéric Le Play (1806–82), whose
Organisation de la Familie
(1871) introduced a typology of families, was not widely known. Le Play posited three family types: the patriarchal extended family; the
familie souche
or ‘stem-family’, with three generational nuclei; and the unstable household unit or
cellule
, which only existed as long as the parents were raising children. Apart from genealogy, which had a very long genealogy, the systematic study of family problems in history had to wait for a hundred years.
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None the less, the variety of studies within the field has become very impressive. One can find studies of everything from wet-nursing techniques in medieval Iceland to bastardy in seventeenth-century England, or paternal authority in nineteenth-century Sardinia. There are several main lines of enquiry. One concerns the formation, structures, and disintegration of household units,
[BASERRIA]
Another centres on the statistical, biological, and sexual trends within the realm of family and kin. A third focuses on the problems of the individuals, of the sexes, and of the generations within the family unit—and hence on ‘life-course analysis’, on women, on labour patterns, on childhood, marriage, and old age.
[GRILLENSTEIN]
A fourth, anthropological focus highlights family customs, ceremonies, and rituals. A fifth is legal, examining the evolutions of family law and government policy. A sixth is economic, examining family budgets in varying agrarian, urban, or industrial contexts. All modern family problems, from single-parenting to unemployment, child discipline, and juvenile crime, have historical roots. Nor has genealogy been forgotten. What was once the passion of a noble élite has recently become the most popular of pastimes.
3
To some extent, historians’ interests reflect the nature of available sources. The households of the medieval nobility, for example, or of Renaissance merchants had long been accessible because both left copious records,
[MERCANTE]
The households of the peasantry or plebs were much less accessible. Yet the application of sociological and quantitative techniques
[RENTES]
and the exploitation of visual, literary, statistical, and oral sources has opened up a wealth of information. No period or location has escaped. Family history has universal appeal. For everyone has either been, or has missed being, the member of a family.
Catherine, too, presents the historian with ‘images of splendor contending with the specter of scandal’.
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A German princess, born in Stettin as Sophia Augusta Frederica von Alhalt-Zerbst, she has few equals in the annals of grasping ambition. Her gross sexual licence was not in itself out of place, but must be judged repulsive when mixed with foul intrigue. The rumour that she died through the failure of a machine called ‘Catherine’s Winch’ whilst trying to make love with a horse is notable only because people have been willing to believe it. More to the point, she seized the throne through a palace
putsch
, having incited the imperial guards to murder her husband, Peter III (r. 1761–2). She governed with the cooperation of a long line often official lovers—from Gregory Orlov, and Gregory Potemkin to Platón Zubov, 38 years her junior. In her favour, it can be said that she headed a civilian entourage practising persuasion more than terror. An indulgent biographer might conclude: ‘she did for Russia what Louis XIV did for France before he became the prisoner of Versailles… autocracy [was] cleansed from the stains of tyranny… despotism turned into a monarchy.’
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