All regimes are tarnished by defeat – this is one of history’s few rules. There have been many worse defeats than the Prussian disasters of 1806–7, but for a political culture so centred on military prowess the defeats at Jena and Auerstedt and the surrenders that followed were definitive none the less. They signified a failure at the centre of the system. The king himself was a commanding officer (though not an especially talented one) who had been in regimental service since childhood and made it his business to be seen riding about in uniform before his advancing regiments. The adult princes of the royal family were all well-known commanders. The officer corps was the agrarian ruling class in uniform. A question mark hung over the political order of old Prussia.
10
The World the Bureaucrats Made
THE NEW MONARCHY
In December 1806, as Frederick William III and Luise of Prussia fled eastwards from the advancing French armies, they stopped overnight in the small East Prussian town of Ortelsburg. There was no food or clean water to be had. The king and his wife were forced to share the same sleeping quarters in ‘one of the wretched barns that they call houses’, according to the British envoy George Jackson, who was travelling with them.1 Here, Frederick William found time to reflect at length on the meaning of the Prussian defeat. In the aftermath of the disasters at Jena and Auerstedt, numerous Prussian fortresses had collapsed under circumstances in which they should have been able to hold out. Stettin, for example, which possessed a garrison of around 5,000 men and was fully provisioned, had surrendered to a small regiment of enemy hussars numbering only 800. The fortress at Küstrin – that shrine of Prussian memory – had surrendered only days after the king himself had left it to move eastward. The collapse of Prussia, it seemed, was as much a question of political will and motivation as of technical inferiority.
The king’s rage over this chain of capitulations found expression in the Declaration of Ortelsburg, a statement composed by Frederick William on 12 December 1806 and written in his own hand. It was still too early, he observed, to draw conclusions about who or what was responsible for the ‘almost total dissolution’ of the Prussian forces in the field, but the fortress capitulations were a scandal ‘without precedent’ in the history of the Prussian army. In future, he wrote, every governor or commander who surrendered his fortress ‘simply for fear of bombardment’ or ‘for any other worthless reason, whatever it might be’, would be ‘shot without mercy’. Any soldier who ‘threw away his weapons out of fear’ would likewise face the firing squad. Prussian subjects who entered the service of the enemy and were found with a weapon in their hand would be ‘shot without mercy’.2 Much of the document reads like a cathartic explosion of anger, but tucked away at the end was a passage that announced a revolution. In future, Frederick William wrote, any fighting man who performed with distinction should be promoted into the officer corps, regardless of whether he was a private, a warrant officer or a prince.3 Amid the chaos of defeat and flight, a process of reform and self-renewal had begun.
In the aftermath of the defeats and humiliations of 1806–7, a new leadership cadre of ministers and officials launched a salvo of government edicts that transformed the structure of the Prussian political executive, deregulated the economy, redrew the ground rules of rural society and reformulated the relationship between the state and civil society. It was the very scale of the defeat that opened the door to reform. The collapse of trust in traditional structures and procedures created opportunities for those who had long been striving to improve the system from within, and silenced their former opponents. The war also imposed fiscal burdens that were insoluble within the parameters of established practice. There was a substantial indemnity to pay (120 million francs), but the real cost of the French occupation, which lasted from August 1807 until December 1808, was estimated by one contemporary at around 216.9 million thalers – a huge sum if we consider that in 1816 total government revenues were just over 31 million thalers.4 The resulting sense of emergency favoured those with forceful and coherent programmes of action and the ability to communicate them persuasively. In all these ways, the exogenous shock of Napoleon’s victory focused and amplified forces already at work within the Prussian state.5
At the centre of the reform process that began in 1807 (though his role has sometimes been under-appreciated) was the King of Prussia, Frederick William III. Important as the reforming bureaucrats were, they could not have carried out their plans without the support of the monarch. It was Frederick William III who appointed Karl vom Stein as his chief adviser in October 1807, until he was forced by Napoleon to dismiss him (after allegations that Stein was plotting against the French). After appointing Alexander Count Dohna and Karl von Altenstein (an old boy from the ‘Franconian clique’) as joint chief ministers, the king called Hardenberg to the ministries of finance and the interior in June 1810 and granted him the new title of Staatskanzler, designating him as Prussia’s first prime minister.
Yet Frederick William III remains a shadowy figure. J. R. Seeley, author of a three-volume nineteenth-century portrait of Stein, described the king as ‘the most respectable and the most ordinary man that has reigned over Prussia’.6 At a time when Prussia’s cultural and political life was dominated by brilliant personalities – Schleiermacher, Hegel, Stein, Hardenberg, the Humboldts – the monarch was a pedantic and narrow-minded bore. His conversation was stunted and brusque. Napoleon, who often dined with him during the summer days in Tilsit, later recalled that it was difficult to get him to talk about anything but ‘military headgear, buttons and leather satchels’.7 Though he was rarely far from the centre of Prussian high politics in the crisis years before the defeat, he appears to us as a cipher, trying to blend into the background, fleeing the moment of decision and leaning on the counsels of those closest to him. As crown prince, Frederick William had been denied the chance to learn the business of government from the inside. (By contrast, he was to offer his own son, the future Frederick William IV, a key role in Prussian domestic politics – yet another example of the dialectical alternation of paternal regimes so characteristic of the Hohenzollern dynasty.) Throughout his life, the king combined a sharp, if reticent, intelligence with a profound lack of confidence in his own abilities. Far from embracing the opportunities of kingship, Frederick William saw the crown as a ‘burden’ to be borne, a burden he felt many others were better qualified to carry than he.
Frederick William’s accession to the throne in 1797 was attended by the usual Hohenzollern contrasts. The father had pursued territorial prizes at every conceivable opportunity; the son was a man of peace who eschewed the quest for glory and reputation. The father’s reign saw the last exuberant gasp of baroque monarchy, with its displays of wasteful splendour and bevies of mistresses; the son was austere in his tastes and remained faithful to his wife. Frederick William III found the City Palace in Berlin too imposing and preferred to stay in the smaller residence he had occupied as crown prince. His favourite domicile of all was a rustic little estate he bought at Paretz near Potsdam. Here he could live in tranquil domesticity and pretend he was an ordinary country squire. Frederick William drew a clear distinction, unlike his predecessors, between his private life and his public functions. He was painfully shy and disliked elaborate public occasions at court. He was shocked when he learned, in 1813, that his children were in the habit of referring to him in his absence as ‘the king’ rather than ‘papa’. He enjoyed watching lightweight comedies at the theatre, partly because he relished the opportunity to be in company without being the centre of attention.
26. King Frederick William and Queen Luise with the family in the palace gardens at Charlottenburg, c. 1805; engraving by Friedrich Meyer after Heinrich Anton Dähling
These might appear trivial observations, were it not for the fact that contemporary observers assigned them so much significance. Throughout the early years of his reign, contemporaries repeatedly drew attention to Frederick William’s unassuming, bourgeois (bürge
rlich) comportment. In 1798, shortly after the accession, the Berlin theatre-poet Karl Alexander von Herklot, acclaimed the king in verse:
He does not care for golden crown
Nor robes with purple dyed.
He is a burgher on the throne.
To be a man’s his pride.8
The theme of the king as an ordinary (middle-class) family man runs through much of the commentary surrounding the early years of the reign. We find it in the following verse addressed to the royal couple upon their accession:
Be not gods to us you kings
Nor goddesses you wives of kings;
Nay, be what you are,
Be worthy human beings.
Show us in noblest model
How one reconciles small things and great:
A cosy life at home
And high affairs of state.9
Perhaps the most striking feature of monarchical discourse after 1797 was the prominence and public resonance of the Prussian queen. For the first time in the history of the dynasty, the king was perceived and celebrated not merely as a monarch, but as a husband. The baroque warlordly portraits of his father’s reign, with their gleaming armour and coils of ermine gave way to restrained family scenes, in which the king was shown relaxing with his wife and children. The queen emerged – for the first time – as a celebrated public personality in her own right. In 1793, when Luise left her native Mecklenburg to be betrothed to her future husband, her arrival in Berlin caused a sensation. When she was welcomed on Unter den Linden by a little girl reciting a verse, she broke with protocol by taking the child in her arms and kissing her. ‘All hearts,’ the poet de la Motte-Fouqué wrote, ‘flew out to her and her grace and sweetness left none untouched.’10
Luise was renowned not only for her charitable work, but also for her physical beauty (a superb full-length double statue of 1795–7 by Johann Gottfried Schadow, in which a teen-aged Luise stands arm-in-arm with her sister Frederike in a virtually transparent summer dress, was closed for many years to public viewing because it was deemed too overtly erotic). Luise was a figure without precedent in the history of the dynasty, a female celebrity who in the mind of the public combined virtue, modesty and sovereign grace with kindness and sex appeal, and whose early death in 1810 at the age of only thirty-four preserved her youth in the memory of posterity.11
As queen, Luise occupied a much more prominent and visible place in the life of the kingdom than her eighteenth-century predecessors. In a notable break with tradition, she joined the king on his inaugural journey through the Prussian lands to receive the oath of fealty from the provincial Estates. During the endless meetings with local worthies, it was said that the new queen impressed everyone with her warmth and charm. She even became a fashion icon. The neckerchief she wore to keep colds at bay was soon widely imitated by women across Prussia and beyond. She was also an important partner to Frederick William in his official role. From the very beginning, she was regularly consulted on affairs of state. She cultivated the most important ministers and made it her business to be informed of political developments at court. It is striking that Stein thought it appropriate to approach the queen with his radical proposal for reform during the crisis of 1806, and equally significant that she should have chosen not to pass the document to her husband, on the grounds that it would merely vex him at a time of extreme stress. Luise provided psychological support for the hesitant king. ‘The only thing you need is more self-confidence,’ she wrote to him in October 1806. ‘Once you have that, you will be able to make decisions much more quickly.’12
27. The princesses Luise and Frederike of Prussia. Die Prinzessinnengruppe by Johann Gottfried Schadow, 1795–97.
In a sense, the prominence of the queen betokened a re-feminization of Prussian royalty after nearly a century when women had been pushed to the margins of monarchical representation. However, the reintegration of the feminine into the public life of the monarchy took place within the parameters of an increasingly polarized understanding of the two genders and their social calling. Luise’s public role was not that of a female dynast with her own court, priorities and foreign policy, but that of a wife and helper. Her formidable skills and intelligence were placed at the service of her husband. This performance of subordination was crucial to the public image of the royal couple and it explains why Luise’s feminine attributes – her prettiness, sweet nature, maternal kindness and wifely virtue – were such prominent features of the cult that sprang up around her. Luise rendered the increasingly withdrawn ‘private sphere’ of the royal family legible to its growing middle-class public. By opening new channels of emotional identification, her celebrity diminished the affective distance between the royal house and the mass of Prussian subjects.13
Luise was, as we have seen, supportive of the oppositional group that emerged to challenge the government’s policies and procedures in 1806 and she pressed the king to recall them to office after the Peace of Tilsit. ‘Where is Baron vom Stein?’ she asked, after the news of Tilsit had sunk in. ‘He is my last hope. A great heart, an encompassing mind, perhaps he knows remedies that are hidden to us. If only he would come!’14 The king needed some persuading to reappoint Stein in the summer of 1807 – he had dismissed him for arrogance and insubordination only a few months earlier. Luise was also an admirer and supporter of Karl August von Hardenberg; indeed, according to one report, his name was one of the last words she uttered to her distraught husband as she lay expiring on her deathbed in 1810.15
Frederick William, too, accepted that the emergency created by the Prussian defeat called for a radical rethink – he had himself demonstrated an interest in reform long before 1806. In 1798, he had established a Royal Commission on Financial Reform and ordered it to propose changes to the administration of customs regulations and toll and excise revenue across the Prussian lands, but the members of the commission failed to harmonize their positions, and Karl August von Struensee, the minister in charge of excise, customs and factories, was unable to provide a coherent summary of its findings. In the following year, Frederick William ordered his officials to draw up plans for a reform of the Prussian prison system. In response, Grand Chancellor von Goldbeck proposed an elaborate – and quintessentially enlightened – system of graded rewards and punishments to encourage the self-improvement and rehabilitation of prisoners. Goldbeck’s recommendations were subsequently incorporated in a general plan for the reform of the Prussian prisons, issued in 1804–5.16
28. Death mask of Queen Luise, 1810
The king would doubtless have achieved more, had it not been for the resistance to reform in many quarters, including the bureaucracy itself. In a cabinet order of October 1798, the king instructed that the Commission on Financial Reform should investigate the possibility of increasing the basic property tax paid by the nobility. Even before the commission had met to discuss this proposal, however, a senior official leaked the order to the Neue Zeitung of Hamburg, where its publication triggered protests from the Prussian provincial Estates.
In the sphere of agrarian reform too, there was a strong record of monarchical initiative. Struck by ‘the unbelievably large number of complaints he had received from peasants’, Frederick William III was determined to do away with servile peasant tenures on the royal domains and an order to this effect was issued in 1799, but the king’s efforts encountered determined resistance from within the General Directory, which argued that tampering with the status of domain peasants would awaken similar aspirations among peasants on noble estates and trigger an ‘uprising of the most numerous class of the people’.17 Only after 1803 did Frederick William override these reservations and instruct the provincial ministers to begin phasing out all remaining peasant labour services on the royal domains.18
BUREAUCRATS AND OFFICERS
Stein and Hardenberg, the two most influential reformers within the Prussian administration after 1806, represented two distinct German progressive traditions. Stein’s familial background had imprint
ed him with a deep respect for corporate representative institutions. At the University of Göttingen he had imbibed a British-style aristocratic whiggery that inclined him towards the devolution of governmental responsibilities upon local institutions. His experiences as a senior Prussian official in the Westphalian coalmining sector had persuaded him that the key to effective administration lay in dialogue and collaboration with local and regional elites.19 Hardenberg, by contrast, was a man of the German enlightenment and sometime member of the Illuminaten, a radical offshoot of Freemasonry. Although he respected the historical role of the nobility in the social order, Hardenberg entertained a much less exalted conception of his caste than Stein. His reforming vision was focused above all upon the concentration of power and legitimate authority in the state. The two men were also temperamentally very different. Stein was awkward, impulsive and haughty. Hardenberg was shrewd, agile, calculating and diplomatic.
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