Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (19 page)

There were, of course, limits to Frederick William’s economic achievement and blind spots in his vision. He shared the widespread contemporary mercantilist preference for regulation and control. There is a clear contrast with the more trade-oriented policies of the Great Elector, who had acquired the colony of Gross Friedrichsburg on the west coast of Africa in the hope that this would open the door to an expansion of colonial commerce. Frederick I had kept up the ailing colony for sentimental reasons, but Frederick William sold it off to the Dutch in 1721, saying he had ‘always regarded this trading nonsense as a chimera’.
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On the domestic front there was a similar disregard for the importance of exchange and infrastructure. Frederick William never seriously tackled the problem of market integration within his territories. Work on the construction of a canal between the Oder and the Elbe accelerated during his reign, a more uniform system of grain measurement was introduced, and there was some reduction – against local protests – of internal tolls. Yet numerous obstacles remained to hinder the movement of goods across the Hohenzollern lands. Even within Brandenburg, tolls continued to be levied on the inner provincial borders. Little effort was made to integrate the outlying territories to the east and west, which were treated in economic terms as if they were foreign principalities. Brandenburg-Prussia was still worlds away from constituting an integrated domestic market when the king died in 1740.
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Under Frederick William, the confrontation between an increasingly confident monarchy and the holders of traditional power entered its administrative phase. By contrast with his predecessors, Frederick William refused at the time of his accession to sign the traditional ‘concessions’ to the provincial nobilities. There were no theatrical set-tos
in the diets (which in any case became much rarer in most areas during his reign). Instead the traditional privileges of the nobilities were whittled away by successive incremental measures. The time-honoured tax immunities of the landed nobility were curtailed, as we have seen; organs that had previously answered to local interests were gradually subordinated to the authority of the central administration; the freedom of noblemen to travel for leisure or study was cut back so that the provincial elites in Brandenburg-Prussia were slowly detached from the cosmopolitan networks of the Holy Roman Empire.

This was not merely a by-product of the process of centralization; the king was quite explicit about the need to diminish the standing of the nobility and clearly saw himself as furthering the historical project inaugurated by his grandfather, the Great Elector. ‘As far as the nobility is concerned,’ he once remarked in relation to East Prussia, ‘it previously had great privileges, which the Elector Frederick William broke through his sovereignty, and I have now brought them entirely into subordination [
Gehorsahm
] through the General Hide Tax of 1715.’
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The central administration he built up to achieve his objectives was deliberately stocked with commoners (who were generally ennobled for their services), so that there would never be any question of corporate solidarity with the noble interest.
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Yet, oddly enough, Frederick William always succeeded in finding talented noblemen – like Truchsess von Waldburg – willing to assist him in implementing his policies, even at the cost of their corporate comrades. The motivations behind such collaboration are not always clear; some were simply won over to the monarch’s administrative vision, others may have been motivated by disaffection with the corporate provincial milieu, or joined the administration because they needed the salary. The provincial nobilities were far from monolithic; factional and family rivalries were common and local interest conflicts often overrode more general concerns. Recognizing this, Frederick William avoided categorical judgements. ‘You must be obliging and gracious with the entire nobility from all provinces,’ he advised his successor in the Instruction of 1722, ‘and give preference to the good ones over the bad and reward the loyal ones.’
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Your Excellency will already know [… ] of the Resolution the new King has taken of increasing his army to 50,000 men. [… ] When the state of war [i.e. military budget] was laid before him, he writt in the margen these words, I will augment my Forces to the number of 50,000 men which ought not to allarme any person whatsoever, since my only pleasure is my Army.
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When Frederick William came to the throne, the Prussian army numbered 40,000 men. By 1740, when he died, it had increased in size to over 80,000, so that Brandenburg-Prussia boasted a military establishment that seemed to contemporaries quite out of proportion to its population and economic capabilities. The king justified the immense costs involved by arguing that only a well-trained and independently financed fighting force would provide him with the autonomy in international affairs that had been denied to his father and grandfather.

Yet there is also a sense in which the army was an end in itself, an intuition reinforced by the fact that Frederick William remained reluctant throughout his reign to deploy his army in support of any foreign-political objective. Frederick William was powerfully attracted to the orderliness of the military; he himself regularly wore the uniform of a Prussian lieutenant or captain from the mid-1720s onward and he could conceive of nothing more pleasing to the eye than the sight of uniformed men moving in ever changing symmetries across a parade square (indeed he flattened a number of royal pleasure gardens in order to convert them for this purpose and tried where possible to work in rooms from which drilling exercises could be viewed). One of the few indulgences in wasteful ostentation he allowed himself was the creation of a regiment of exceptionally tall soldiers (affectionately known as ‘
lange Kerls
’ or ‘tall lads’) at Potsdam. Immense sums were squandered on the recruitment from all over Europe of these abnormally tall men, some of whom were partially disabled by their condition and thus physically unfit for real military service. Their likenesses were memorialized in individual full-length oil portraits commissioned by the king; executed in a primitive realist style, they show towering men with hands like dinner plates plinthed on black leather shoes the size of plough shares. The army was, of course, an instrument of policy, but it was also the human and
institutional expression of this monarch’s view of the world. As an orderly, hierarchical, masculine system in which individual interests and identities were subordinated to those of the collective, the king’s authority was unchallenged, and differences in rank were functional rather than corporate or decorative, it came close to actualizing his vision of an ideal society.

9. Portrait of Grenadier James Kirkland, soldier in the Royal Guard of King Frederick William I, painted by Johann Christof Merk
, c.
1714

Frederick William’s interest in military reform predated his accession to the throne. We see it in a set of guidelines that the nineteen-year-old crown prince proposed to the Council of War in 1707. The calibres of all infantry guns should be the same, he argued, so that standard-issue shot could be used for all types; all units should employ the same design of bayonet; the men in each regiment should wear identical daggers on a model to be determined by the commanding officer; even the cartridge pouches were to be furnished according to a single design, with identical straps.
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One of his important early innovations as a military commander was the introduction within his own regiment of a new and more rigorous form of parade drill intended to heighten the manoeuvrability of
unwieldy masses of troops across difficult terrain and to ensure that firepower could be delivered consistently and to the greatest effect. After 1709, when Frederick William witnessed Prussian troops in action at the Battle of Malplaquet during the War of the Spanish Succession, the new drill was gradually extended through the Brandenburg-Prussian forces as a whole.
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The king’s chief preoccupation during the early years of the reign was simply to increase the number of troops in service as fast as possible. At first, this was accomplished largely through forced recruitments. The responsibility for raising troops was transferred from the civil authorities to the local regimental commanders. Operating virtually without restraint, the recruiting officer became a figure of fear and hatred, especially among the rural and small-town population, where he prowled in search of tall peasants and burly journeymen. Forced recruitments often involved bloodshed. In some cases, prospective recruits even died at the hands of their captors. Complaints poured in from the localities.
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In fact so dramatic was the first phase of forced recruitments that it prompted a wave of panic. ‘[His Majesty] makes use of such hasty means in levying of [his troops] as if he was in some very great danger,’ wrote William Breton, the British envoy, on 18 March 1713, scarcely three weeks after the new king’s accession, ‘that the peasants are forced into the service and tradesmen’s sons taken out of their shops very frequently. If this method continues, we shall not long have any market here, and many people will save themselves out of his Dominions…’
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Faced with the mayhem generated by forced recruiting, the king changed tack and put an end to the practice inside his territories.
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In its place he established the sophisticated conscription mechanism that would come to be known as the ‘canton system’. An order of May 1714 declared that the obligation to serve in the king’s army was incumbent upon all men of serving age and that anyone fleeing the country in order to avoid this duty would be punished as a deserter. Further orders assigned a specific district (canton) to each regiment, within which all the unmarried young men of serving age were enrolled (
enrolliert
) on the regimental lists. Voluntary enlistments to each regiment could then be supplemented from enrolled local conscripts. Finally, a system of furloughs was developed that allowed the enlisted men to be released back into their communities after completion of their basic training. They could then be kept on until retiring age as reservists who were
obliged to complete a stint of refresher training for two to three months each year, but were otherwise free (except in time of war) to return to their peacetime professions. In order to soften further the impact of conscription on the economy, various classes of individual were exempted from service, including peasants who owned and ran their own farms, artisans and workers in various trades and industries thought to be of value to the state, government employees and various others.
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The cumulative result of these innovations was an entirely new military system that could provide the Brandenburg-Prussian Crown with a large and well-trained territorial force without seriously disrupting the civilian economy. This meant that at a time when most European armies still relied heavily on foreign conscripts and mercenaries, Brandenburg-Prussia could raise two-thirds of its troops from territorial subjects. This was the system that enabled the state to muster the fourth largest army in Europe, although it ranked only tenth and thirteenth in terms of territory and population respectively. It is no exaggeration to say that the power-political exploits of Frederick the Great would have been inconceivable without the military instrument fashioned by his father.

If the canton system provided the state with a greatly enhanced external striking power, it also had far-reaching social and cultural consequences. No organization did more to bring the nobility into subordination than the reorganized Brandenburg-Prussian army. Early in the reign, Frederick William had prohibited members of the provincial nobilities from entering foreign service, or indeed even from leaving his lands without prior permission, and had a list drawn up of all the sons of noble families aged between twelve and eighteen years. From this list a cohort of boys was selected for training in the cadet school recently established in Berlin (in the premises of the academy where Gundling had once worked as professor). The king persevered with this policy of elite conscription despite bitter protests and attempts at evasion by some noble families. It was not unknown for young noblemen from recalcitrant households to be rounded up and marched off to Berlin under guard. In 1738, Frederick William inaugurated an annual survey of all young noblemen who were not yet in his service; in the following year he instructed the district commissioners to inspect the noble sons of their districts, identify those who were ‘good looking, healthy and possess straight limbs’ and send an appropriate annual contingent for enlistment in the Berlin cadet corps.
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By the mid-1720s there were
virtually no noble families in the Hohenzollern lands without at least one son in the officer corps.
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