by Will Durant
The war completed that hardening of his character which had begun as a defense against his father’s cruelty. He looked on with stoic calm as condemned soldiers ran the gauntlet thirty-six times.3 He harassed his officials and generals with secret spies, sudden intrusions, abusive language, stinted pay, and such detailed commands as stifled initiative and interest. He never won the love of his brother Prince Henry, who served him so effectively and loyally in diplomacy and war. He had some women friends, but they feared rather than loved him, and none of them was admitted to his inner circle. He respected the silent suffering of his neglected Queen, and on his return from the war he surprised her with a present of 25,000 thalers; but it is doubtful if he ever shared her bed. She learned to love him nevertheless, seeing him heroic in adversity and devoted in government; she spoke of him as “our dear King,” “this dear Prince whom I love and adore.”4 He had no children, but he was deeply attached to his dogs; usually two of them slept in his room at night, probably as a guard; sometimes he took one of them into his bed to warm him with animal heat. When the last of his favorite dogs died he “wept all day long.”5 He was suspected of homosexuality,6 but of this we have only surmise.
Beneath his martial carapace there were elements of tenderness which he rarely exposed to public view. He wept abundantly over the death of his mother, and he repaid with sincere affection the devotion of his sister Wilhel-mine. He spread little inconspicuous kindnesses among his nieces. He laughed at Rousseau’s sentiment, but he forgave his hostility and offered him asylum when the Christian world cast him out. He passed from the stern drilling of his troops to blowing melodies from his flute. He composed sonatas, concertos, and symphonies which he shared in performing before his court. The learned Burney heard him there, and reported that he played with “great precision, a clean and uniform attack, brilliant fingering, a pure and simple taste, a great neatness of execution, and equal perfection in all his pieces”; Burney adds, however, that “in some of the difficult passages … his Majesty was obliged, against the rules, to take a breath in order to finish the passage.”7* In later years his increasing shortness of breath, and the loss of several front teeth, compelled him to give up flute playing, but he resumed study of the clavier.
Next to music, his favorite diversion was philosophy. He liked to have a philosopher or two at his table to flay the parsons and stir the generals. He held his own in exchanges with Voltaire, and remained a skeptic when most of the philosophes developed dogmas and fantasies. He was the first avowedly agnostic ruler of modern times, but he made no public attack upon religion. He thought that “we have sufficient degrees of probability to reach the certainty that post mortem nihil est, ”9 but he rejected the determinism of d’Holbach, insisting (like a man who was will incarnate) that the mind acts creatively upon sensations, and that our impulses can, through education, be controlled by reason.10 His favorite philosophers were “my friend Lucretius, … my good Emperor Marcus Aurelius”; nothing of any importance, he thought, had been added to them.11
He agreed with Voltaire in believing that the “masses” bred too fast, and worked too hard, to allow time for real education. Disillusionment with their theology would only incline them to political violence. “The Enlightenment,” said Frederick, “is a light from heaven for those who stand on the heights, and a destructive firebrand for the masses”;12 here was a history of the September Massacres of 1792 and the Terror of 1793 before the French Revolution had begun. And to Voltaire in April, 1759: “Let us admit the truth: philosophy and the arts are diffused amongst only a few; the great masses … remain as nature made them, malevolent animals.”13 He called mankind (half in humor) “diese verdammte Rasse”— this damned race—and laughed at utopias of benevolence and peace:
Superstition, self-interest, vengeance, treason, ingratitude, will produce bloody and tragic scenes until the end of time, because we are governed by passions and very rarely by reason. There will always be wars, lawsuits, devastations, plagues, earthquakes, bankruptcies. … Since this is so, I presume it must be necessary. … But it seems to me that if this universe had been made by a benevolent being, he should have made us happier than we are. … The human mind is weak; more than three fourths of mankind are made for subjection to the most absurd fanaticism. Fear of the Devil and of hell fascinates their eyes, and they detest the wise man who tries to enlighten them.... In vain do I seek in them that image of God which the theologians assert they bear upon them. Every man has a wild beast in him; few can restrain it; most men let loose the bridle when not restrained by terror of the law.14
Frederick concluded that to allow governments to be dominated by the majority would be disastrous. A democracy, to survive, must be, like other governments, a minority persuading a majority to let itself be led by a minority. Frederick thought like Napoleon that “among nations and in revolutions aristocracy always exists.”15 He believed that an hereditary aristocracy would develop a sense of honor and loyalty, and a willingness to serve the state at great personal cost, which could not be expected of bourgeois geniuses formed in the race for wealth. So, after the war, he replaced with Junker most of the middle-class officers who had risen in the army.16 But since these proud nobles could be a source of fragmentation and chaos, and an instrument of exploitation, the state should be protected against division, and the commonalty from class injustice, by a monarch wielding absolute power.
Frederick liked to picture himself as the servant of the state and the people. This may have been a rationalization of his will to power, but he lived up to the claim. The state became for him the Supreme Being, to which he would sacrifice himself and others; and the demands of that service overrode, in his view, the code of individual morality; the Ten Commandments stop at the royal doors. All governments agreed with this Realpolitik, and some monarchs accepted the view of kingship as a sacred service. Frederick had the latter notion through contact with Voltaire; and through contact with Frederick the philosophes developed their these royale— that the best hope for reform and progress lay in the enlightenment of kings.
So, despite his wars, he became the idol of the French philosophers, and softened the hostility even of the virtuous Rousseau. D’Alembert long refused Frederick’s invitations, but did not withhold his praise. “The philosophers and men of letters in every land,” he wrote to Frederick, “have long looked upon you, Sire, as their leader and their model.”17 The cautious mathematician at last succumbed to repeated calls, and spent two months with Frederick at Potsdam in 1763. Intimacy (and a pension) did not diminish d’Alembert’s admiration. He was delighted with the King’s disregard of etiquette, and with his remarks—not only on war and government, but also on literature and philosophy; this, he told Julie de Lespinasse, was finer converse than one could then hear in France.18 When, in 1776, d’Alembert was desolate over Julie’s death, Frederick sent him a letter which shows the ogre in a wise and tender vein:
I am sorry for the misfortune which has befallen you. … The wounds of the heart are the most sensitive of all, and … nothing but time can heal them.... I have, to my misery, had only too much experience of the suffering caused by such losses. The best remedy is to put compulsion upon oneself in order to divert one’s mind. … You should choose some geometrical investigation which demands constant application. … Cicero, to console himself for the death of his dear Tullia, threw himself into composition.... At your age and mine we should be the more readily consoled because we shall not long delay to join the objects of our regrets.19
He urged d’Alembert to come again to Potsdam. “We will philosophize together concerning the nothingness of life, … concerning the vanity of stoicism.... I will feel as happy in allaying your grief as if I had won a battle.” Here was, if not quite a philosopher king, at least a king who loved philosophers.
This no longer applied to Voltaire. Their quarrels in Berlin and Potsdam, and the arrest of Voltaire in Frankfurt, had left wounds deeper than grief. The philosopher remained bitter longer
than the King. He told the Prince de Ligne that Frederick was “incapable of gratitude, and never had any except for the horse on which he ran away at the battle of Mollwitz.”20 The correspondence between these two most brilliant men of the century reopened when Voltaire wrote to dissuade the desperate warrior from suicide. Soon they were exchanging reproaches and compliments. Voltaire reminded Frederick of the indignities which the philosopher and his niece had suffered at the hands of the King’s agents; Frederick answered: “If you had not had to do with a man madly enamored of your fine genius, you would not have gotten off so well. … Consider all that as done with, and never let me hear again of that wearisome niece.”21 But then the King stroked the philosophic ego bewitchingly:
Do you want sweet things? Very good; I will tell you some truths. I esteem in you the finest genius that the ages have borne; I admire your poetry, I love your prose. … Never has an author before you had a touch so keen, a taste so sure and delicate. … You are charming in conversation; you know how to amuse and instruct at the same time. You are the most seductive being that I know. … All depends for a man upon the time when he comes into the world. Though I came too late, I do not regret it, for I have seen Voltaire , … and he writes to me.22
The King supported with substantial contributions Voltaire’s campaigns for the Calas and the Sirvens, and applauded the war against l’infâme, but he did not share the philosophes’ trust in the enlightenment of mankind. In the race between reason and superstition he predicted the victory of superstition. So, to Voltaire, September 13, 1766:
Your missionaries will open the eyes of a few young people. … But how many fools there are in the world who do not think! … Believe me, if the philosophers founded a government, within half a century the people would create new superstitions. … The object of adoration may change, like your French fashions; [but] what does it matter whether people prostrate themselves before a piece of unleavened bread, before the ox Apis, before the Ark of the Covenant, or before a statue? The choice is not worth the trouble; the superstition is the same, and reason gains nothing.23
Having accepted religion as a human need, Frederick made his peace with it, and protected all its peaceful forms with full toleration. In conquered Silesia he left Catholicism undisturbed, except that he opened to all faiths the University of Breslau, which had previously admitted only Catholics. He welcomed, as valuable teachers, the Jesuits who, expelled by Catholic kings, sought refuge under his agnostic rule. He protected as well Mohammedans, Jews, and atheists; and in his reign and realm Kant practiced that freedom of speech and teaching and writing which was so sharply rebuked and ended after Frederick’s death. Under this toleration most forms of religion declined in Prussia. In 1780 there was one ecclesiastic per thousand population in Berlin; in Munich there were thirty.24 Frederick thought that toleration would soon put an end to Catholicism. “It will take a miracle to restore the Catholic Church,” he wrote to Voltaire in 1767; “it has been struck by a terrible apoplexy; and you will yet have the consolation of burying it and writing its epitaph.”25 The most thorough of skeptics had forgotten for a moment to be skeptical of skepticism.
II. REBUILDING PRUSSIA
No ruler in history ever worked so hard at his trade, except perhaps his pupil Joseph II of Austria. Frederick disciplined himself as he did his troops, rising usually at five, sometimes at four, working till seven, breakfasting, conferring with his aides till eleven, reviewing his palace guard, dining at twelve-thirty with ministers and ambassadors, working till five, and only then relaxing into music, literature, and conversation. The “midnight” suppers, after the war, began at half past nine, and were over at twelve. He allowed no family ties to distract him, no court ceremonies to burden him, no religious holidays to interrupt his toil. He watched the work of his ministers, dictated almost every move of policy, kept an eye on the treasury; and over all the government he established a Fiscal, or bureau of accounts, empowered to examine any department at any time, and instructed to report any suspicion of irregularity. He punished malfeasance or incompetence so rigorously that official corruption, which flourished everywhere else in Europe, almost disappeared from Prussia.
He prided himself on this, and on the rapid recovery of his devastated country. He began with domestic economies that earned him gibes from the extravagant courts of defeated Austria and France. The royal household was as frugally managed as a tradesman’s home. His wardrobe was a soldier’s uniform, three old coats, waistcoats soiled with snuff, and one ceremonial robe that lasted him all his life. He dismissed his father’s retinue of huntsmen and hunting dogs; this warrior preferred poetry to the hunt. He built no navy, sought no colonies. His bureaucrats were poorly paid, and he provided with like parsimony for the modest court that he maintained at Berlin—while he stayed in Potsdam. Yet the Earl of Chesterfield judged it “the politest, the most shining, the most useful court in Europe for a young fellow to be at,” and added, “You will see the arts and wisdom of government better in that country now [1752] than in any other in Europe.”26 Twenty years later, however, Lord Malmesbury, the British minister to Prussia, perhaps with a view to consoling London, reported that there was “in that capital [Berlin] neither an honest man nor a chaste woman.”27
Frederick checked his parsimony when national defense was concerned. By persuasion and conscription he soon restored his army to its prewar strength; only with that weapon in hand could he maintain the territorial integrity of Prussia against the ambitions of Joseph II and Catherine II. That army, too, had to buttress the laws that gave order and stability to Prussian life. Organized central force, he felt, was the only alternative to disorganized and disruptive force in private hands. He hoped that obedience through fear of force would grow into obedience through habituation to law—which was force reduced to rules and hiding its claws.
He renewed his behest to jurists to codify into one system of law—an “Allgemeine Preussische Landrecht”—the divers and contradictory legislation of many provinces and generations; this task, interrupted by the death of Samuel von Cocceji (1755) and by the war, was resumed by Chancellor Johann von Carmer and Privy Councilor K. G. Svarez, and was completed in 1791. The new code took feudalism and serfdom for granted, but within those limitations it sought to protect the individual against private or public oppression or injustice. It abolished superfluous courts, reduced and quickened legal procedure, moderated penalties, and raised the requirements for appointment to magistracies. No sentence of death could be executed without sanction by the king, and appeal to the king was open to all. He won a reputation for impartial justice, and Prussian courts were soon acknowledged to be the most honest and efficient in Europe.28
In 1763 Frederick issued a “Generallandschulreglement” confirming and extending the compulsory education proclaimed by his father in 1716-17. Every child in Prussia, from his fifth to his fourteenth year, was to attend school. It was characteristic of Frederick that Latin was dropped from the elementary curriculum, that old soldiers were appointed as schoolmasters, and that most learning was by semimilitary drill.29 The King added: “It is a good thing that the schoolmasters in the country teach the youngsters religion and morals.... It is enough for the people in the country to learn only a little reading and writing. … Instruction must be planned … to keep them in the villages and not to influence them to leave.”30
Economic reconstruction received priority in time and money. Using at first the funds that had been collected for another, now unneeded, campaign, Frederick financed the rebuilding of towns and villages, the distribution of food to hungry communities, the provision of seed for new sowings; he dispersed among the farms sixty thousand horses that could be spared from the army. Altogether 20,389,000 thalers were spent in public relief.31 War-ravaged Silesia was excused from taxes for six months; eight thousand houses were built there in three years; a land bank advanced money to Silesian farmers on easy terms. Credit societies were established at various centers to encourage agricultural e
xpansion. The marshy area along the lower Oder was drained, providing cultivatable land for fifty thousand men. Agents were sent abroad to invite immigrants; 300,000 came.32
As serfdom bound the peasant to his lord, there was not in Prussia that freedom to move to the towns which, in England, made possible the rapid development of industry. Frederick worked in a hundred ways to overcome this handicap. He lent money on easy terms to entrepreneurs; he permitted temporary monopolies; he imported workmen; he opened technical schools; he set up a porcelain factory in Berlin. He strove to establish a silk industry, but the mulberry trees languished in the northern cold. He promoted vigorous mining in Silesia, which was rich in minerals. On September 5, 1777, he wrote to Voltaire as one businessman to another: “I am returning from Silesia, with which I am well content. … We have sold to foreigners 5,000,000 crowns’worth of linen, 1,200,000 crowns’worth of cloth.... A much simpler process than that of Réaumur has been discovered for making iron into steel.”33
To facilitate trade the King abolished internal tolls, widened harbors, dug canals, and built thirty thousand miles of new roads. Foreign trade was held back by high duties on imports and by embargoes on the export of strategic goods; international chaos compelled the protection of home industry to ensure industrial adequacy in war. Nevertheless Berlin grew as the hub of trade as well as government: in 1721 it had 60,000 population; in 1777 it had 140,000;34 it was preparing to be the capital of Germany.