Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (44 page)

The doctrine of the primacy of the state also framed Frederick’s attitude to the international context. It implied, firstly, a fairly cavalier attitude to treaties and other such obligations, since these could at any time be cast aside if they no longer served the state’s interest. Frederick applied this idea in practice when he abandoned the Nymphenburg coalition in 1742 and 1745, leaving his allies in the lurch while he settled a separate peace with the Austrians. It can also be seen at work in the invasion of Silesia, which tore holes in the international legal order of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet this was of no concern to Frederick, who, unlike his father, regarded the Empire with contempt. Its mode of governance, he observed in the Political Testament of 1752, was ‘bizarre and outdated’.
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From Frederick’s standpoint (and that of Pufendorf and many eighteenth-century German critics of the Reich), the Holy Roman Empire, with its overlapping jurisdictions and its multiple, interpenetrating layers of sovereignty, represented the antithesis of the state
principle. There were still angry memories of 1718 and 1725, when delegations of noblemen from the province of Magdeburg had succeeded in winning an appeal against a new Prussian tax before the imperial court in Vienna. One of the important steps by which Frederick consolidated the constitutional autonomy of his kingdom was the agreement of 1746, by which the Habsburg Emperor formally renounced imperial jurisdiction over the territories of Prussia. Frederick could now instruct Samuel von Cocceji, a brilliant jurist who had already served under his father, to draw up a general law code based ‘solely upon reason and the legal practices in the [Prussian] territories’. This was an important moment, because it signalled the beginning of the end for the old imperial system. The struggle between Prussia and Austria represented in this sense a conflict between the ‘state principle’, based on the primacy of the state over all domestic and supra-territorial authorities, and the ‘imperial principle’ of diffused authority and mixed sovereignty that had been a defining feature of the Holy Roman Empire since the Middle Ages.

For all the sincerity of Frederick’s commitment to the abstract authority of the state, however, there were some glaring discrepancies between theory and practice. Although Frederick acknowledged in principle the inviolability of the published laws and rules of procedure, he was prepared, when he deemed it necessary, to override the kingdom’s judicial authorities. The most famous example of such unilateral intervention was the ‘Miller Arnold Affair’ of 1779–80. A miller by the name of Christian Arnold had refused to pay lease-rent to his landlord, Count Schmettau, because the local district commissioner, Baron von Gersdorff, had excavated a system of carp-ponds that had cut off the stream to his mill-wheel and thus deprived him of his livelihood. Having been condemned to eviction by the local court, Arnold and his wife sought the help of the king himself. Despite an irritable cabinet order from the king to the effect that the judgement against Arnold was to be suspended, the Justice Department in Küstrin confirmed the original verdict. Furious at what he saw as the manipulations of a provincial oligarchy, Frederick ordered that the case be transferred to the Chamber Court in Berlin. When the Chamber Court in its turn confirmed the verdict against Arnold, Frederick ordered that the three judges responsible be arrested and detained for one year in a fortress. The commissioner’s carp-ponds were to be demolished, the water-course to
Arnold’s mill-race restored, and all his costs and losses made good. The case scandalized the senior administration, but it was also a public sensation. In a cabinet order published in newspapers and gazettes across the kingdom, the king justified his actions, stating that his intention was to ensure that ‘every man, be he of high or low estate, rich or poor’ should receive ‘prompt justice’ at the hands of an ‘impartial law’. In short: a gross breach in legal procedure was justified in terms of a higher ethical principle.
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Frederick’s concept of the state was also less inclusive in a territorial sense than his father’s had been. He was much less concerned with the integration of the outlying territories. Many of the mercantilist economic regulations applied to the Brandenburg heartland were not extended to the western provinces, whose goods were treated for taxation purposes like foreign merchandise. The government’s efforts to integrate East Prussia into the grain economy of the entire kingdom through the magazine system slackened during Frederick’s reign. The canton system was not extended throughout the western provinces. The three regiments of the city of Wesel, he noted in 1768, have no cantons, ‘because the population of these provinces is not suitable for military service; it is limp and soft, and when the man of Kleve is transferred far from his home, he suffers from homesickness, like the Swiss’.
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Little attempt was made to integrate the small outlying principality of Neuenburg-Neuchâtel, a French-speaking canton of Switzerland acquired in personal union by Frederick I in 1707. The Prussian governor was absent during long periods of the reign of Frederick the Great, so that the influence of Berlin was scarcely felt.
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Frederick assigned clear priority to the central provinces of the kingdom. In a revealing passage of the Political Testament of 1768, he even declared that only Brandenburg, Magdeburg, Halberstadt and Silesia ‘constituted the actual body of the state’. This was in part a matter of military logic. What distinguished the central lands was the fact that they could ‘defend themselves, as long as the whole of Europe [did] not unite against their sovereign’.
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East Prussia and the western possessions, by contrast, would have to be given up as soon as hostilities began. Perhaps this helps to explain why Frederick discontinued the momentous East Prussian reconstruction programme his father had launched.
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The conduct of his subjects under foreign occupation during the Seven Years War also seems to have given him pause. He was
particularly resentful of the fact that the Estates of East Prussia had sworn an oath of fealty to his nemesis Tsaritsa Elisabeth in 1758. After 1763, Frederick, the indefatigable chief inspector of his realm, never made a single visit to East Prussia. He simply ordered the East Prussian chamber presidents to report to him in Potsdam or to attend him at his headquarters during the annual manoeuvres in West Prussia.
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This reflected a significant demotion in the importance of this province, which had been something of a fetish to Frederick William I and his grandfather the Great Elector.

If we read them literally, Frederick’s comments on the state sometimes seem to imply that the functions of the sovereign have been partly absorbed into the impersonal collective structures of an administration working in accordance with transparent rules and regulations. Yet the reality could hardly have been more different, for the governance of Prussia during Frederick’s reign was an intensely personal affair; indeed, in some respects the political process was even more concentrated on the person of the king than it had been under his father, Frederick William I. His father had created a collegial system of ministerial government in which the monarch often took his cue from the recommendations of a powerful council of ministers. But this system fell into disuse after Frederick’s accession to the throne. His personal contacts with ministers became ever more rare after 1763, as their functions were duplicated and partly displaced through the king’s growing reliance on cabinet secretaries attached directly to his own person.

The political process thus came to centre more and more around the small team of secretaries who controlled access to the king, oversaw his correspondence, kept him up to date on developments and advised him on policy issues. Whereas the secretaries travelled around with the monarch, the ministers generally remained in Berlin. While the ministers tended to be aristocratic grandees such as Karl Abraham Freiherr von Zedlitz (the minister charged with educational affairs), the secretaries were mostly commoners. A characteristic example was the reclusive but enormously influential August Friedrich Eichel, the son of a Prussian army sergeant who usually began work at four o’clock in the morning. Under Frederick William I, responsibility and influence had been tied to the function of the individual within the administrative system; under Frederick, by contrast, proximity to the sovereign was the decisive determinant of power and influence.

Paradoxically, this concentration of power and responsibility in the king reversed the centralizing impetus of the reforms introduced by Frederick William I. By communing directly with the chamber officials in the provinces, Frederick undermined the authority of the General Directory, whose purpose was to act as the supervisory authority overseeing the various provincial officialdoms. On many occasions, Frederick even issued orders to the provincial chambers without informing the central administration, thus enhancing the authority of the provincial administrators, shifting power away from the centre and loosening the sinews of the territorial state structure.
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Frederick saw no reason to doubt the efficacy of this highly personalized system. As he pointed out in the Political Testament of 1752, it was necessary ‘in a state like this one that the prince conducts his affairs himself, because if he is clever he merely pursues the interest of the state, whereas a minister always follows ulterior motives that touch upon his own interests…’
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In other words, the interests of the state and those of the monarch were quite simply identical in a way that did not apply to any other living person. The hitch with this arrangement lay in the conditional clause ‘if he is clever’. The Frederician system worked well with the indefatigable, far-sighted Frederick at the helm, applying his quick and capacious intellect, not to mention his courage and decisiveness, to the problems that came to his desk. But what if the king were not a genius-statesman? What if he found it difficult to resolve dilemmas? What if he were hesitant and risk-averse? What, in short, if he were an ordinary man? With a monarch like that in the driving seat, how would this system function under pressure? Frederick, we should remember, was the last of a freakish run of abnormally gifted Hohenzollern rulers. Their like would not be seen again in the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Without the discipline and focus of a powerful figure at the centre, there was the danger that the Frederician system might splinter into warring factions, as ministers and cabinet secretaries competed for control of their overlapping jurisdictions.

The Prussian enlightenment was about conversation. It was about a critical, respectful, open-ended dialogue between free and autonomous subjects. Conversation was important because it permitted the sharpening and refinement of judgement. In a famous essay on the nature of enlightenment, the Königsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant declared that

Enlightenment refers to man’s departure from his self-imposed tutelage. Tutelage means the inability to make use of one’s own reason without the guidance of another. This tutelage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in intellectual insufficiency, but in a lack of will and courage [… ]. Dare to know! [
Sapere aude
!] Have the courage to use your own reason! This is the motto of the Enlightenment.
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Read in isolation, this passage makes enlightenment seem a solitary business, encapsulated in the struggle of an individual consciousness to make sense of the world. But at a later point in the same essay, Kant observes that this process of self-liberation through reason has an unstoppable social dynamic.

It is possible that a public may enlighten itself; indeed if its freedom is not constrained this is virtually inevitable. For there will always be a few individuals who are capable of thinking for themselves despite the established authorities that claim to exercise this right in their name, and who, as soon as they have cast off the yoke of tutelage, will spread about them the spirit of a reasoned appreciation of one’s own worth and the duty of every person to think for himself.
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In the percolation through society of this spirit of critical, confident independence, conversation played an indispensable role. It flourished
in the clubs and societies that proliferated in the Prussian lands – and more broadly in the German states – during the second half of the eighteenth century. The statutes of the ‘German societies’, a supra-territorial enterprise whose network included a society founded in Königsberg in 1741, explicitly defined the formal conditions for fruitful conversation among the members. During the discussion that followed readings or lectures, members were to avoid arbitrary or ill-considered comments. Critiques should engage in a structured way with the style, method and content of the lecture. They should employ, in Kant’s phrase, ‘the cautious language of reason’. Digressions and interruptions were strictly prohibited. All members were ultimately guaranteed the right to have their say, but they must wait their turn and make their comments as concise as possible. Satirical or mocking remarks and suggestive wordplay were unacceptable.
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We find the same preoccupation with civility among the Freemasons, whose movement had grown to encompass between 250 and 300 German lodges with 15–18,000 members by the end of the eighteenth century. Here too, there were injunctions to avoid immoderate speech, frivolous or vulgar commentary and the discussion of topics (such as religion) that would stir divisive passions among the brothers.
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This may all sound stiflingly prim from a present-day perspective, but the purpose of such rules and norms was serious enough. They were designed to ensure that what mattered in discussion was not the individual but the issue, that the passions of personal relationships and local politics were left behind when members joined the meeting. The art of polite public debate had still to be learned; these statutes were the blueprints of a new communicative technology.