The body of Frederick I lay in state in full baroque splendor, with the trappings of an age he had loved, admired and done so much to emulate in his barren kingdom. At his feet, deep in thought, stood the new King, Frederick William I. Rather abruptly he straightened himself, turned on his heels and walked out of the room leaving behind him not only the body of his father, the guard of honor and the dim light of his candles, but also another age. The threshold which he crossed was one into an era he meant to be vastly different from his father.
Macaulay has described him as being a man whose ‘character was disfigured by odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never been seen before out of a madhouse…the mind of Frederick William was so ill regulated, that all his inclinations became passions, and all his passions partook of the character of moral and intellectual disease.’ A nicely turned phase alone does not make good history, though Macaulay is not the only one to have fallen victim to his superficial impression. After all it was one shared by many of Frederick William’s contemporaries. With utter incomprehension they observed the unfolding of a spectacle that seemed to contradict the very essence of the spirit of the time, the beginnings of the European Enlightenment. The generous and careless rule of the first Hohenzollern king was to be followed by the rule of a man who carefully appreciated the resources of his territories, or their lack of them, a man who reversed the principle of the Baroque age that revenue had to be adequate to meet expenditure by stating that expenditure should on no account exceed available revenue.
His succession to the crown was tantamount to being in a revolution against the hitherto prevailing form of princely absolutism. While the art of the Baroque as the propagandist expression of the Counter-Reformation appealed to the senses and dominated not only the Hapsburg Empire, Spain and France but also the Protestant courts, Frederick William’s Calvinist heritage quickly asserted itself by drastically reducing pomp and splendor, making way in his kingdom for a functionalism in the style and appearance of government hitherto unheard of. No wonder contemporaries viewed him as the ‘Barbarian of the North’.
Within hours of the death of his father, he assembled his first council around him and ordered that all valuables such as precious stones, silver and rare furniture in the various royal residences be listed and then the latter sealed. The following day the army swore their loyalty to the new King. For the next eight days his father’s ministers were forbidden to approach him about government matters. After that period had elapsed he confirmed everyone in his office and emphasized to them that while his father had found his pleasure in architectural ostentation and great amounts of jewels, he himself would find the same satisfaction in a great quantity of good troops. Only Rudiger von Ilgen, who had hitherto looked after Brandenburg-Prussia’s external affairs, had two new officials attached to him. Together they formed the Cabinet Council whose members were later to be known by the title Cabinet Ministers.
Five weeks later came drastic economy measures. They began with horse fodder. Ministers and other notables who had until then receive fodder for 20 or even 30 horses were reduced to fodder sufficient for 6. Lesser mortals, such as the court chaplains, received none at all. The royal stables were reduced from 600 to 120 horses. ‘My father gave everyone horse fodder so that they would follow him across the country, but I cut it down so that everyone stays in Berlin’, said Frederick William. This measure was followed by a military reorganization which he had had in mind and even planned in great detail when still Crown Prince. The costly and splendid-looking force of guards, who gave great pleasure to the eye but were of little fighting value, were transformed into regiments of the line, the Swiss guards were dissolved completely. All that remained of the guards was one battalion, the King’s very own tall grenadiers, which he had commanded as a Crown Prince and which he paid and equipped from his own personal revenue. The cavalry was reorganized into 55 squadrons, each numbering 150 horses, while the infantry was ordered into 50 battalions, or 25 regiments; the artillery for the time being was to number 2 battalions. These economy measures enabled Frederick William to save enough money actually to increase the total number of his army from 39,000 men to 45,000. His father’s death, from that point of view, had come at a very convenient moment. On the eve of the Peace of Utrecht the Prussian forces, until then tied down in the west, became free, and Frederick William was able to maintain them with his own resources rather than being dependent on foreign subsidies.
After the army it was the turn of his own court to feel the royal economies. Its members, that is to say its officials had their salaries, cut, in many cases down to 25 percent of what they had received under Frederick I and in one particular case even down to 10 percent. These were the lucky ones, for the majority of personnel at court was made redundant, and from there transferred either into the administration or the army ‘according to their inclinations to the sword or to the pen’. The office of master of ceremonies was one that was abolished, making a short-lived reappearance only in the form of a practical joke by Frederick William when he appointed his court jester, Gundling, a disreputable historian addicted to drink, to the post. Even Andreas Schluter, the sculptor and architect to whom Berlin owed the Schloss and the masks of dying warriors at the Zeughaus, could no longer expect any royal commissions and therefore went to St. Petersburg, where he died shortly thereafter.
However, to explain the King’s economy measures exclusively in terms of economic motives would show only one side of the coin. Calvin’s teachings of divine predestination had played an important part in the King’s education. His teacher Philippe Rebeur, himself a French Huguenot refugee, posed the question to his pupil as to whether he belonged to the Lord’s chosen few, to the elect, and whether he could thus be sure that the House of Hohenzollern would be blessed with fortune, the sign of the Lord’s divine benevolence. This question was to preoccupy Frederick William throughout his life, causing hours of brooding and searching torment, so much so that in the education of his own children he explicitly prohibited the teaching of Calvinist predestination. Upon Frederick William himself it had left its indelible mark. Indeed, one of the vital motivating forces behind Frederick William I was religion, his own brand of reformed Lutheranism. One of the reasons why his personal rule never degenerated into absolute tyranny was his deeply rooted conviction that one day he would have to account for his deeds to his maker. Of considerable importance in this context is the Pietist movement and its influence upon Prussia, both in the short and long term.
Though the importance of the personal connection between Frederick William I and August Hermann Francke, the Pietist reformer at Halle, can be overstressed, the Pietist influence as an integrating force of Prussian society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seems to have been frequently underestimated, if not altogether ignored. By Pietism, very crudely summarized, one understands primarily the German brand of Puritan reaction to the Thirty Years War with its upheaval of the Lutheran faith. The Pietists confronted the Lutheran acceptance of the world as it is and the submission of the individual to it, with reform proposals. They did not oppose Luther’s hope for the day of judgment, but they criticize man’s social environment penetratingly. To Luther’s call for a reform merely of the church, they added the call for a reform of the world and its social institutions. Pietism as a religious and social force was highly complex and world-wide in its aspirations.
As far as Prussia was concerned the Pietists aimed at producing responsible subjects, and a society whose members, irrespective of the station they occupied in life, would have their social conscience turned towards the common weal. Their schools were by the far the most advanced in the kingdom and hence, through what at first was a personal connection between Frederick William I and Francke, the avenue was opened for products of the Pietist schools and academies to enter the Prussian civil service, the army and its officer corps. Pietism produced a social and religious ethos which characterizes the Prussia of the eighteenth and [JG1]nineteenth century. It was a religion ideal for civil servants, as much as Puritanism was a religion ideal for entrepreneurs, a religion sober and hard, drawing into its circle all the estates of the kingdom. In conjunction with the transformation of the feudal estates of the Junkers into private holdings in return for financing and officering the army, Pietism played a major role in the de-feudalization of the Prussian aristocracy. In the army Pietists obtained chaplaincies and thus the army and the administration became the major channels through which Pietist influence and thought percolated to the lower levels of Prussian society.
Theoretically at least, 1717 saw the beginning of compulsory elementary education in Prussia, and among the new schools that were founded those of the Pietists were the most numerous. The ideal product of their education was not the aristocratic cavalier of the Age of the Baroque, but the businesslike, matter-of-fact state functionary. This, perhaps, supplies one explanation as to why Germans outside Prussia rarely considered the highly placed Prussian civil servants or the Prussian officers worth emulating, but looked rather to the French grand seigneur and the English gentlemen.
Actively supported by the dynasty, Pietism permeated all levels of society with an ethos in which all efforts were directed towards maintaining and securing the whole, even if this operated at times at the expense of the individual. The demand of unconditional, unflinching fulfillment of their duties by all – nobility, burghers and peasants alike – led to situations of which it can well be said that Frederick William I and his son Frederick the Great treated their subjects worse than dogs; but it must be said that they treated themselves no better. Duty and the common weal were principles enforced at a time when their harshness was giving way elsewhere in favor of comfortable, humane and liberal ideas, in an age inclined more towards Epicurus rather than Seneca, when insistence upon the fulfillment of human duties receded and was replaced by the demand for human rights. While other powers were satiated, Prussia still meant to catch up, thus causing considerable discomfort all round. The moral implications of Seneca’s maxim viverer est militare had validity by the end of the eighteenth century only in Prussia.
Frederick William I continued the policy initiated by his father of supporting the Pietists and their institutions, a policy which he realized was yielding immense dividends for the Prussian state. Yet he never became a Pietist himself and in spite of his reformed Lutheranism the stern Calvinist streak in him never disappeared. He saw himself and his every action as accountable to God. The prosperity of the state was a sign of divine approval; given Prussia’s fragility, positioned in the midst of great powers, the task of the monarch was that his every action be an example to his subjects lest divine approval be withdrawn. It is against this background that one ought to examine the conflict with his son, it makes the excesses of the King more explicable than transporting nineteenth-century liberal value judgment on to eighteenth century Prussia.
Against this background and in this spirit Frederick William acted from the day he succeeded to the throne. It determined his attitude towards his own family as much as it did towards the nobility and his struggle between the Hohenzollerns and their Brandenburg and East Prussian nobility against the former’s policy of centralization.
Even in a predominantly agrarian society such as eighteenth century Prussia the successful functioning of the bureaucracy required specialized knowledge, an increasing measure of expertise and thus a division of labor. Evan an absolute monarchy cannot concentrate all knowledge and all expertise in one man or small group of men. Hence intrinsic in the growth of any bureaucracy is the tendency towards its independence, towards emancipation from an absolutist monarchy. Frederick William I was well aware of this danger, as was also his son, and what he therefore built up was a very dependent, purely technically functioning apparatus which was meant to do very little else other than carry out the will of its princely managing director.
But even this was not enough: if among other things the bureaucracy was to check the nobility, the danger of the bureaucracy becoming too independent could, according to Frederick William, only be met by recruiting the bureaucracy from the aristocracy as well as from the educated middle class. This would foster rivalry between the two social classes, now side by side within one institution, and prevent an alliance between the two against the monarchy. Besides, the religious ethos which permeated Prussian society of the eighteenth century in general, and the army and bureaucracy in particular, was itself a major check against conflicts of interest ever taking on such proportions as to endanger the fabric of the state.
In fact the effective replacement of the remnants of medieval institutions by a centralized monarchic state run effectively by a civil service constitutes the major achievement of Frederick William I. Army and civil service became the main pillars of the kingdom of Prussia, a kingdom made up of highly diverse components artificially held together by the two institutions which represented most prominently the state community.
A major step towards the consolidation of the Prussian state was taken by Frederick William’s ordinance of 13th August 1713 which declared all royal domains and property as indivisible and inalienable. Already his father had abolished the ancient rule according to which each noblemen could do as he liked on new lands or territories he had acquired. Frederick William’s measure constituted a further move towards the transformation of the territories into a unified state. Since for more than a century and a half the nobility of Brandenburg-Prussia had encroached upon the royal domain as well as upon the property of free peasants substantial land transfers had taken place without ever having been officially registered. In East Prussia, for instance, this process was not really noticed until Frederick William I replaced the multitude of dues and taxes by one general land tax, a tax determined by the size of the holding and the quality of the soil. This in turn required a survey of the lands of the province. In the course of the survey it was revealed that one-third of the land holdings of the Prussian nobility in East Prussia had been illegally acquired from either the royal domain or the peasants.
Upon Frederick William’s accession to the throne, the Prussian administration consisted essentially of two main bodies: the General Finance Directory responsible for the administration of the royal domains, and the General War Commissary responsible for the administration of the army and the revenue. Both bodies possessed far-reaching judicial powers in administrative affairs, while each had its branches in every province of the kingdom. However, until the reign of Frederick William these provincial branches had been subject to a considerable degree of control by and interference from the local notables. With the beginning of his reign the influence of the estates in the provincial branches of the central administration was eliminated. In other words, what to all intents and purposes had been provincial tax offices became commissaries, which were staffed and controlled from the centre. And in order to facilitate their smooth functioning the chief administrators in each province, the Landrate, posts hitherto filled by nominees of the estates, now became the King’s civil servants which the King without the consultation of any other body filled with his own men. Of course changes of this sort were not brought about without encountering resistance, resistance from the nobility but very often also from the office-bearers themselves. The latter had previously been recruited form the province in which they took up their office; Frederick William insisted that his civil servants should not work in the area of their origin. Two officials who because of this ruling were to be transferred from Konigsberg to Tilsit and who opposed the move were told by the King: ‘One has to serve one’s Lord with one’s life and possessions, with honor and good conscience, with everything except one’s salvation. This is for our Lord, but everything else must be mine. They shall dance to my tune or the devil will fetch me.’ Again the emphasis upon himself rather than that the devil should fetch them is noteworthy!
In a wider European sense the 17th and 18th centuries saw the transformation of a state and society based on the power and economic resources of the estates, their origins rooted in medieval Europe, into an absolutist state. In Brandenburg-Prussia this period covered the time between the Great Elector and Frederick the Great. Yet not one absolutist monarchy ever had truly absolute power because of the historical accretion of interdependent relationships which no ruler could sever entirely and which in themselves represented checks to the freedom of action of any monarch.
In economic terms this change was paralleled by the rise of the mercantilist system which found its first classic expression in the France of Louis XIV. Economic power was subordinated to the purposes of the state. The beginnings of this process in Brandenburg-Prussia can be seen in the construction of an administration serviceable to the whole state. But these were only tentative beginnings which under Prussia’s first King, with neither inclination and ability for administration nor the vision to realize the importance of an efficient administration for the stability of the state, were not further developed. Hence the accession of Frederick William I meant a resumption of the policies of his grandfather.
One would misunderstand not only the essence of his work but also the character of the man if his domestic policy were considered as an imitation of the French example. On the contrary: France, that is to say the French monarchy, had worked herself into a serious national debt; Frederick William I ended his reign with a surplus. In France the maxim was that revenue had to be created to meet the demands of the monarchy. In Prussia the financial expenditure of the state, including the monarchy, was adjusted to the available revenue. The Age of the Baroque whether in France, Austria, or Spain was built on credit, credit obtained through banks and through increasing burdens of taxation for its subjects. The splendors of the Baroque, whether at Versailles, in Salzburg or at the residence of the Bishop of Wurzburg, were built on the backs of the people and in the main that meant the peasants. With their toil and sweat ‘culture’ was created.
Frederick William’s determination to reverse this trend, to create a stable state and society by living according to the available means, obviously meant that was no longer any place in Berlin for a talent like Schluter. According to Frederick William the state could not afford his grandiose architecture. For the first time in Prussian history an annual budget was established, based on the revenue that could be expected, and from that determined the expenditure for the individual departments or areas.
The pronouncements of the eternal indivisibility of all royal domains and other landed possessions amounted to a proclamation of the indivisibility of the entire territory of the state, thus removing the ruler’s privilege, as practiced hitherto, of doing with his territories and subjects as he liked. But it also meant a rejection of the plans of the discredited Luben, plans which from Frederick William’s point of view would have amounted to a disposal of the royal domain. It was the first step towards transforming Prussia from a royal state into a state community.
At first Frederick William’s allodificaiton of the estates did cause some protest, because with this measure the higher nobility was also deprived of such services as the lower nobility had been obliged to render them. Frederick William wished these services to be commuted into money payments. It caused legal wrangles before the Imperial Court council which were never resolved. In the meantime Frederick William proceeded on the basis of the decrees he had issued.
The coexistence of revolutionary policy and conservatism was very largely facilitated by Brandenburg-Prussia’s social structure. Until well into the nineteenth century Prussia’s economic power base was its agrarian economy. The ratio of rural to urban population towards the end of the eighteenth century has been calculated as 7:2 and the increase in royal revenue between 1713 and 1786 was not due to increased taxation, specifically land tax or the excise affecting the towns, but was the result of additional land being put under cultivation and agricultural output being maximized. The Prussian provinces supplied by far the larger part of the revenue and the significance of the role of the towns, cities and their manufacturing industries at this time has, as the result of a remark once made by Frederick the Great, frequently been overestimated. Equally of course, it was neither city nor town which formed the recruiting ground for the army, but the land, and it was precisely the relationship between Prussia’s military system and its agrarian economy that determined the kingdom’s social structure.
The standing army of the Great Elector, a remnant of the private armies of the Thirty Years War, was, during his reign and establishment of princely absolutism, ‘nationalized’ by being turned from a private into a state instrument. The initial heterogeneity of its officer corps was of considerable advantage when the landed nobility was still powerful enough to obstruct the ruler’s policies when the Prussian Junker aristocracy, despite fiscal and land concessions, was slow in being integrated into the new state. Yet after the reforms of Frederick William I the army became the major institution through which the nobility could be absorbed into the state.
Until 1730 the army was recruited at random, and frequently by force, from among the German and East European population and very substantially from the peasantry of Brandenburg-Prussia. As a result Prussia’s western provinces suffered a great depletion of their population as the peasants simply fled into neighboring German territory-a trend almost as pronounced in Prussia’s eastern provinces. Over the long term, therefore, a decline in agricultural output was inevitable and with it a decline in state revenue. That prospect was sufficient to compel Frederick William I to seek a compromise between the demands of his military policy and the requirements of Prussia’s agrarian economy.
The result of the Cantonal Reglement of 1730 was a rapid acceleration in the growth of the Prussian army, between 1731 and 1733; not only that, it caused a transformation in Prussian social structure. The peasant now played an important threefold role which Frederick the Great clearly recognized when he said that the peasants formed that class ‘which deserves the greatest respect of all, because their fiscal burdens are the heaviest, they supply the entire state with essential foodstuffs and at the same time the largest number of recruits for the army and also a steady addition to the number of burghers.’ A state whose economic strength depended on the maximization of existing agricultural resources and on increasing the amount of land under cultivation could not afford depopulation and had to ‘maintain that species of peasants which is most admirable.’ The estate of the peasantry was consequently of fundamental importance to Prussia, for ‘it represents its foundation and carries its burden, it has the work, the others the fame.’
The bureaucracy as an institution was the necessary executive arm of Prussian absolutism. However, that royal absolutism and as well-functioning bureaucracy are in the long run mutually exclusive was a fact of which Frederick William I quickly became aware after his accession to the throne. His father had allowed this institution to grow into a serious contender for supreme power in the dynastic state. Frederick William quickly counter-acted this situation by a highly personal policy ‘which restricted and widened the appointment to the upper grades of the executive hierarchy’. While in general the number of law experts and of non-military nobility declined, three groups in particular were in ascent. Firstly there were the businessmen who had been successful in their careers, men who knew how to produce and how to be efficient. Secondly there were the officials who had been raised form the status of petty-officials by royal grace, men familiar with the ‘red tape’ of day-to-day administration and capable of cutting it at points where it was thought unnecessary. Retired soldiers, usually former non-commissioned officers, also belonged to this group and they filled numerous posts in the bureaucracy and the teaching profession in lieu of a pension. These, together with the third group of military bureaucrats, in the last analysis introduced the military tone as well as the high professional ethos into the Prussian civil service. They set a model of obedience, chaired royal committees and boards, and exercised an important influence on urban administration in particular. That this produced an uneasy alliance ‘between commoners and heirs of superior social rank’ (Hans Rosenberg) is a contention devoid of proof. There is nothing to show that the representatives of these classes were aware of the existence of any such uneasiness.
Of the soldier’s equipment only uniform and weapons were supplied by the army; a whole host of smaller articles of clothing had to be bought by the soldier himself and paid for by means of deductions from his wages. This really ensured that the army as such was also an economic driving force within the urban economy. Given the fact that the excise tax was levied on the towns only and that the presence of troops in the town inevitably increased consumption, then it is understandable that Frederick William I once remarked: ‘When the army is on the march then the excise loses one-third.’ This primarily economic motivation explains Frederick William’s reluctance actually to deploy his forces in any warlike action; it also goes some distance towards explaining his foreign policy.
Frederick William’s passion for tall grenadiers was based on the belief that taller soldiers were better for bayonet attacks. This was the one passion he possessed for which he was prepared to spend considerable sums quite recklessly. However, the source of income which financed this hobby did not come form the normal state revenue but from two other sources: the King’s own private income derived form his estates and a specially established recruitment fund to which voluntary contributions could be made. This fund was the one and only avenue by which venality in office-holding entered the Prussian bureaucracy. It was possible, by making a suitable contribution to the recruitment fund, to obtain a desired office-which however, did mean that the holder would continue in that office if found to be incompetent. Moreover, considering the venality of office-holding in other European countries, that in Prussia was almost insignificant.
Yet in spite of this centralized administration competition between the two major instruments of government and their respective subordinate organs was keen. The General Finance Directory, because it administered the royal domain, was primarily influenced by agrarian considerations and thus had a ready ear for agrarian interests. It also represented essentially the principle of Free Trade. The General War Commissary on the other hand was rather more urban-orientated, understandable in view of the facts that the towns were the garrisons of the army and that the towns brought in the excise. In essence it represented mercantilist interests and pursued policies accordingly. Friction between these two interest groups was frequent and the King’s intervention was often necessary. Ultimately he could find no other solution to end the feud than to unify the two offices, giving them the name General Superior Finance War and Domains Directory. The name was too complex and was ultimately reduced to General Directory. In instructions devised by the King and written in his own hand, he laid down the powers of this new office. It was composed of four provincial departments, each department headed by a minister under whom were three or four councilors. The first department encompassed East Prussia, Pomerania and Neumark, the second the Kurmark, Magdeburg and Halberstadt, the third the Rhenish Provinces and the fourth the Westphalian provinces of the kingdom. To ensure that the horizon of each department was not limited to the geographical area under its control, the King delegated to each department specific tasks which affected the whole of the kingdom. Thus the first department was responsible for questions affecting the frontiers of the kingdom and for turning forests into arable lands; the second for the maintenance of the main roads, the marching routes of the army, and for military finance; the third for postal affairs and the mint; and the fourth looked after the general accounts.
The fusion also took place at provincial level, the new offices, called War and Domain Chambers, being responsible for the towns as well as for the countryside, for general taxation as well as for the revenue derived form the royal domains. As in the central authority, the decision-making process was a collegiate one, every councilor being head of a particular department or area consisting of towns, country and domains, and decisions being taken after joint discussion. In contrast to the practice of his father and grandfather, Frederick William insisted that none of the councilors in the chambers was a native of the province in which he worked, a move to prevent local interests entrenching themselves in the local administration.
Under the War and Domain Chamber functioned the Landrate. If the administrative apparatus was completely reformed so was the administration of the cities. For centuries they had operated under their own constitutions, ruled usually by a patrician oligarchy anxious to preserve and extend its existing privileges. At the accession of Frederick William there was hardly a city or town in his kingdom that was not seriously in debt, which provided the lever by which he could introduce major reforms. With the more rigorous enforcement of the excise tax and the quartering of garrisons, the organs of the central administration in the towns reached a greater degree of efficiency, pushing aside the old traditional ruling powers. Committees of investigation examined the finances of each town and regulated the settlement of existing debts. In practice this led to the elimination of most forms of communal self-administration. City councilors were now no longer burgers of the town they lived in, elected or appointed by a small group of fellow citizens, but royal civil servants coming from other parts of the country. As at state level the financial administration of each city or town was based on a firm annual budget. Specifically communal taxation was abolished and urban taxation made uniform throughout the kingdom. Treasury officials supervised financial administration, as well as most public affairs, jointly with the garrison commander. These treasury officials were formed into a Steuerrat, a revenue council, and each revenue council supervising six to 12 towns.
At the very apex of the administration was the King himself. While the central administration was located in Berlin, the king resided mainly in Potsdam or in one of his hunting chateaux, his favorite being Wusterhausen in the Mark Brandenburg. His ministers had to submit their reports to the King, and the King in turn would formulate his answers and decisions in his own cabinet with the aid of several personal secretaries. The Cabinet Order was the ultimate piece of legislation in the state of Brandenburg-Prussia. This method of government, highly personal and concentrated upon one person as it was, naturally required immense diligence and detailed knowledge from the King. He possessed both to an extraordinary degree, making him, together with his son, unique in the age of absolutism.
The system of taxation too was reformed, particularly the land tax. It was not so much a question of levying new taxes as of distributing the existing taxes most equitably, from the poorer to the richer. Although as a result of the financial policies of the Teutonic Knights the nobility in East Prussia had never been formally exempted themselves. And as the administration of revenue affairs lay in the hands of the nobility anyway, this had not been very difficult to achieve. Frederick William instead of continuing with a system of taxation which was as confused as it was evaded, replaced it with a general tax based on an assessment of the income of the state.
Frederick William I also introduced the firm distinction between the state budget and the ruler’s personal budget. From 1713 to the end of the eighteen century Prussia’s finances showed a surplus; in other words there was no need for a national debt as was the case in Great Britain, the Netherlands, France and Austria. Emergencies were to be met with funds put aside for that purpose, the state treasury.
Of all the provinces of the kingdom that of East Prussia was most affected by the reform work of the King, domestic and foreign policy being inextricably intertwined here. The Great Northern War brought for Prussia the desired access to the sea at the mouth of the Oder. Poland, as an aristocratic republic, was moving towards internal dissolution, but Russia under Peter the Great had emerged as a great power. During the Great Northern War its troops had entered Pomerania, to the rear of East Prussia. Peter the Great seemed to display an interest in the harbors of Memel and Pillau. Avoiding direct confrontation, it was one of the cardinal points of Frederick William’s policy to develop and maintain cordial relations with Russia. The domestic pendant to this policy was the ‘Retablissement’ of East Prussia, for one-third of the population had perished by the Black Death and hunger. It benefited most by his administration and reforms.
The worst hit areas of East Prussians were in the north-east and the south-east, a total of 27,000 farms in those areas being without tenants. It was there that in the wake of the institutional reforms a vast scheme of colonization was embarked upon. Of 30,000 Protestants expelled because of their faith from their native Salzburg region of Austria, and who had taken up Frederick William’s invitation to Prussia, 15,000 found their homes in East Prussia, all on royal domain. Wherever necessary the state built houses for them, supplied agricultural implements, seed and livestock. Throughout his life this successful recolonization of East Prussia was Frederick William’s great pride, the link between the colonizing activity of Teutonic Order and the consolidation of the Prussian kingdom. At the time of Frederick William’s death in 1740 the population of East Prussia was back to the level it had been before the great famine.
Casually related to the Retablissement of East Prussia are the beginnings of the judicial reforms in the entire kingdom. The root cause of the need for reform was the different judicial traditions existing in the various territories of the kingdom. Leibniz had already tried his hand at it and in 1701 he devised a uniform legal code; others did so after him, without much success. Samuel von Cocceji, a discerning legal brain of middle class origins, had been previously entrusted by Frederick William with bringing order into the legal system of East Prussia and he proved resoundingly successful. It was in his hands, therefore, that the King placed the entire problem of judicial reform. Whereas the judiciary had been a collegiate body Cocceji now became its first head, but given the complexity of the task he could only make beginnings and even then suffered setbacks. The only improvements achieved in Frederick William’s lifetime were in the realm of the penal code, and the problem of judicial reform accompanied the entire reign of his successor , not finding its final solution until the reign of Frederick William. II.
The Prussian state rested upon the triple foundations of an agrarian economy, strong military power and an efficient civil service, all three closely integrated and subordinated to one aim, the maintenance and prosperity of the state. This had little or nothing to do with the perpetuation and increase of power for the sake of one individual: it was the expression of the growing ideology of the state community pure and simple, a secularized version of that ideology which in their heyday had made the Teutonic Knights outstanding colonizers, administrators and politicians. It was a subjugation of all sectors and aspects of public life to the purposes of the state.
Frederick William’s objective in his foreign policy was to consolidate and maintain what had so far been achieved by his ancestors and by himself. In his testament of 1722 he implores his successor:
I beg you not to begin an unjust war, because God has forbidden unjust wars. You must give account for every man killed in an unjust war. look at history and you will see that nothing good has come form unjust wars. This, my dear successor, demonstrates the hand of God…. Therefore, my dear successor, I beg you not to commence an unjust war in order that God’s blessing may lie always upon you and your army, and give you courage. You are of course a great lord upon the earth, but you have to account to God for all the blood split in an unjust cause. That is a hard fact. Therefore I beg you to keep your conscience clear before God and you will enjoy a happy reign.
The role that Frederick William envisaged for Prussia in international affairs was one that would enable her to gain modest advantages out of the wars of the great European powers, ‘because he who can hold the balance in the world, will always profit for his land and command the respect of your friends and the fear of your enemies.’ This policy was securely founded on domestic stability and was also in accord with his religious principles. ‘The state had as yet not become the content of religion and the sole subject of reason.’
For Prussia in particular the outcome of the Great Northern War meant the partial fulfillment of those ambitions which the Great Elector had cherished. All of those ambitions were no longer practicable, nor were they in the mind of Frederick William. Prussia had obtained Stettin and parts of Vorpommern; overshadowed by the great powers, by necessity veering towards Russia rather than Britain. In addition to a division within his own family over the issue, relations between Prussia and Britain took on a sharper tone. On the other hand, the greater independence with which Frederick William acted also alienated to some extent the Emperor Charles VI, who felt that Vienna could no longer depend on the immediate support from Prussia that they had enjoyed in the reign of Frederick I. This brought about closer relations between Vienna, Hanover and London while the Elector of Saxony also felt his interests threatened by the Russian menace and therefore joined the other powers. This alliance actually prevented the complete destruction of Sweden and under pressure from these powers Prussia forsook its Russian ally and made a separate peace with Sweden on 1 February 1720. Russia fought on alone for another year until it signed a peace with Sweden at Nystad at 1721. But to symbolize where his sympathies lay, Frederick William did not accept the homage of the city of Stettin until the final conclusion of the hostilities of the Great Northern War in 1721.
Four years later the existing European alliances were dramatically reversed. Spain, resenting Britain’s presence in Gibraltar and the frequent clashes with her in the West Indies, concluded an alliance with the Emperor in Vienna, an alliance also joined by the German Roman Catholic principalities. The former enemies France and Great Britain also concluded an alliance which was joined by Hanover and on 3 September 1725 also by Prussia. The Prussia move was an emotional outburst, the dangerous character of which he quickly recognized when the widow of Peter the Great, Catherine I, joined Austria. Prussia was now likely to be the most vulnerable defender of the French and British interests and to prevent this he concluded a treaty with the Emperor in 1726 which two years later was expanded into a fully-fledged alliance, the Treaty of Berlin of 23 December 1728. Prussia now became a firm supporter of the Reich and in 1726 ratified the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 which confirmed the indivisibility of the Hapsburg crown lands and admitted a female successor to the Hapsburg throne.
The relationships between father and son had already been deteriorating for some time. From Frederick Williams’s point of view his son had no other task than to continue his father’s work; to do so his son was to display the same qualities as distinguished his father and there was every sign that he did not. Frederick was drawn by every fiber of his intellect towards the European Enlightenment and French culture. Given Frederick William’s firm religious conviction that the prosperity of the state was a sign of divine approval, and his belief that the duty of the monarch was that his every action be an example to his subjects lest divine approval be withdrawn, his son’s interest and his way of life were the very opposite of all that he believed in. Frederick William demanded, prohibited and cursed; his son obstructed, evaded and made sarcastic jokes which soon got back to the ears of the father. Frederick loved music and had secretly taken tuition in playing the flute, an instrument on which he excelled; on the other hand he loathed the army and called his uniform ‘the death shirt’. In a court such as Frederick William’s which was run on a very tight budget, his son’s comparatively lavish way of life cost money, money which he borrowed from the outside. Tension between father and son was ever-present, violent outbreaks of the royal temper very frequent.
Similar to the state of Teutonic Order in its own time, the Prussian kingdom under Frederick William I had succeeded in an epoch-making achievement, significant not only in the history of Germany but also in that of Europe. With a total population of tow and a half million it maintained from its own resources an army of 60,000 whose annual budget amounted to about five million thales out of a total state budget of about seven. By 1740 Frederick William had accumulated reserves of about eight million thales. In terms of its population Prussia occupied the twelfth position among the European powers, in terms of the peacetime condition of its army the fourth, and in terms of the military effectiveness of its army the first.
By the end of the reign Frederick William could look back on the solid achievement of the consolidation of a state based upon an institutional framework within which the endeavors of all elements it contained were directed towards maintaining this artificial structure. The militarization of an agrarian society, the Pietist ethos, all were very on the way towards combining into a specifically ‘Prussian’ way of life which was bound to retard liberalization of Prussia’s political, social and economic order. The accent lay on stability and conservation rather than allowing room for the free flow of social forces. By 1740 the God which Hegel was to adulate was already in existence: the God by the name of der Staat.