Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (39 page)

In Austria, the protracted struggle with Prussia prompted, as we have seen, a radical rethinking of external policy. Kaunitz, the mastermind behind the realignment of 1748–56, remained in office until 1792, although his authority declined after the death of Joseph II in 1790. The Prussian challenge also had profound domestic implications. The raft of initiatives launched in 1749–56 and known as the First Theresian Reform focused exclusively on tightening the administration of the Habsburg monarchy in ways that would enable it to strike back effectively at Prussia. The central executive was substantially recast so as to centralize and simplify the most important administrative organs. A new tax regime was introduced, indirectly inspired by the new Prussian administration in Silesia, which was closely watched by the Austrians. The architect of these changes was Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz, a convert to Catholicism who had fled his native Silesia when the Prussians invaded. No one was more determined to learn from the example set by Frederick II than Maria Theresa’s eldest son and successor, Joseph II. It was partly from contemplating Frederick’s achievement that Joseph derived his passionately held view that the Habsburg monarchy must become more like a unitary state if it were to master the challenges it faced in a competitive European environment. His attempts to bring this about in the 1780s would bring the Habsburg monarchy close to internal collapse.
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Prussia too bore the marks of the three wars it had fought for Silesia.
The Prussian lands had been extensively devastated and the tasks of reconstruction consumed the lion’s share of domestic investment during the last two decades of Frederick’s reign. The population of deserted areas and the draining of marshes for new arable land and pasture remained a high priority. In largely agrarian Polish-speaking Masuria, for example, colonists were lured in from Württemberg, the Palatinate and Hessen-Nassau to live and work in a host of new settlements: Lipniak (1779), Czayken (1781), Powalczyn (1782), Wessolowen (1783), Ittowken (1785) and Schodmak (1786). These settlements advanced in parallel with the construction of an extensive canal network designed to drain the waterlands of southern Masuria, hitherto one of the most isolated and underdeveloped regions of the kingdom. The excess water was drawn away into the rivers Omulef and Waldpusch and new villages sprang up on what had once been a vast impassable marsh.
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It was above all in the aftermath of 1763 that Frederick began to show an expanded sense of the state’s social obligations – especially to those who had risked life and limb in the service of his armies. ‘A soldier who sacrifices for the general good his limbs, his health, his strength and his life,’ Frederick declared in 1768, ‘has a right to claim benefits from those for whom he risked everything.’ An institute was established in Berlin to house and care for 600 war invalids and a fund was set up in the war chest from which payments were made to poverty-stricken soldiers who had returned to their rural homes. Low-wage jobs with the excise, customs and the tobacco monopoly and other minor government-paid posts were reserved for soldiers who had fallen on hard times.
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Perhaps the most dramatic expression of the king’s heightened willingness to use the apparatus of the state for the purposes of social provision in the broadest sense was the intensified use of the grain excise and magazine system to counter the effects of food shortages, price rises and famines. In 1766, for example, Frederick suspended the excise on grains in order to ease the flow of cheap imports into Prussia; three years later the excise was reintroduced, but only for wheat, so that the burden of the bread tax fell exclusively on the better-off consumers who chose to purchase white bread. The high point of Prussia’s post-war food policy came in the winters of 1771 and 1772, when the administration kept a Europe-wide famine at bay through the controlled release of large amounts of grain from the magazine stocks. The needs of the civilian
population were allowed to override the military imperatives for which the magazine system had originally been fashioned. We can thus speak of these massive subsidies in kind as an exercise in social welfare policy.
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The war also slowed the pace of administrative integration. In the early years of his reign, Frederick had furthered this process through the creation of new administrative organs such as the Fifth Department, responsible for industrial policy throughout the territories, or the Sixth Department for Military Affairs, another authority with all-Prussian responsibility.
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Yet the momentum of integration was not maintained after 1763, mainly because the experience of war had taught Frederick that he would never be able to defend his peripheral possessions against attack – it was characteristic that he should allow this geostrategic consideration to determine his economic priorities in peacetime. East Prussia was thus never fully integrated into the grain magazine system, and after the Seven Years War grain transfers from East Prussia to the core provinces were gradually scaled down to make way for cheaper Polish imports.
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The effort to integrate the western provinces into the fiscal structure of the core provinces also flagged from 1766, when the project of a unitary excise regime was abandoned and the grip of Berlin on the local administrations loosened tangibly thereafter.
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It is worth emphasizing these retardatory effects, since it is often assumed that war was the crucial driver of state-building in the Prussian lands.

Frederick had greatly increased the international standing of his kingdom through the acquisition of Silesia, yet it would be wrong to presume that this imbued him with confidence and a sense of strength. Indeed, quite the opposite was the case. Frederick remained acutely aware of the fragility of his achievement. In the Political Testament of 1768, he observed that the European continental ‘system’ comprised only ‘four great powers, which overshadow all the others’; Prussia was not among them.
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In 1776, after a spell of serious illness, the king became preoccupied with the idea that the state he had worked so hard to consolidate would disintegrate after his death.
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Frederick recognized that there was a fundamental mismatch between Prussia’s international reputation and its meagre domestic resources.
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There was thus, in his eyes, no excuse for complacency. Prussia stood in desperate need of measures to compensate for its power-political weakness. The years after 1763 thus witnessed, as we have seen, a programme of intensified domestic reconstruction. In the diplomatic sphere, Frederick’s first priority was to
neutralize the threat from Catherine the Great’s expanding Russia. In keeping with his own doctrine that a prince should always ally himself with the power best placed to strike at him, Frederick focused his efforts on securing a non-aggression pact with Russia. The high point of this diplomacy was the Prussian-Russian alliance of 1764, which cancelled at one stroke the threat from Russia and the danger of an Austrian revanche.
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Since alliances are flimsy things whose duration depends upon the good will of individuals – the treaty of 1764, for example, collapsed in 1781 with the fall from power of the Russian Foreign Minister Nikita Panin – Frederick’s ultimate security was still the deterrent effect of his army. Prussia remained heavily armed after the Peace of Hubertusburg. In 1786, it was the thirteenth largest European state in population and the tenth largest in area, yet boasted the third largest army. With a population of 5.8 million, Prussia sustained an army of 195,000. In other words, there was a soldier for every twenty-nine subjects. The size of the army, expressed as a percentage of the total population, was thus 3.38 per cent, a figure that compares with the highly militarized states of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War (the figure for the German Democratic Republic in 1980, for example, was 3. 9 per cent). It was the size of this army that moved Georg Heinrich Berenhorst, an adjutant to Frederick II during the Seven Years War, to make the memorable observation that ‘the Prussian monarchy is not a country which has an army, but an army which has a country, in which – as it were – it is just stationed.’
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Yet the percentage figure is somewhat misleading, since only 81,000 of these soldiers were native-born Prussians. Expressed as a percentage of total population this yields a figure of only 1. 42 per cent, which is comparable with the western European states of the late twentieth century (the figure for the German Federal Republic in 1980, for example, was 1. 3 per cent). Prussia was thus a highly militarized
state
(i.e. one in which the military consumed the lion’s share of resources), but not necessarily a highly militarized society. There was no universal conscription. Peacetime training was still short and perfunctory by present-day standards, the social structure of the army still porous. The hiving off of the military into barracks, where troops could be concentrated and indoctrinated over years of training, was still in the distant future.

And what of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation?
Observing the progress of the Seven Years War, the Danish minister Johann Hartwig Count Bernstorff noted that the issue at stake in this great conflict was not simply the ownership of a province here or there, but the question of whether the Holy Roman Empire should have one head, or two.
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We have seen that the relationship between Brandenburg and Austria had always been troubled by intermittent tension. As Brandenburg began to operate with a degree of autonomy within imperial politics, the potential for conflict grew. Yet for a long line of successive Electors, the pre-eminence of the Emperor and, by extension, of the House of Habsburg, was beyond question. With the invasion of 1740, all this changed. The annexation of Silesia provided Prussia not only with money, produce and subjects, but also with a broad corridor of land extending from the Brandenburg heartland straight to the margins of Habsburg Bohemia, Moravia and the Austrian hereditary lands. It was a dagger poised over the heart of the Habsburg monarchy. (This would prove decisive in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, when two of the four Prussian army groups entered Bohemia from assembly points in Silesia to crush the Austrian army at Königgraätz.) ‘Never will Austria get over the pain of Silesia’s loss,’ Frederick wrote in his Political Testament of 1752. ‘Never will it forget that it must now share its authority in Germany with us.’
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For the first time, the political life of the Empire began to orient itself around a bipolar balance of power. The era of Austro-Prussian ‘dualism’ had begun. Henceforth, Prussian foreign policy would focus first and foremost on safeguarding its place in the new order and containing Vienna’s efforts to redress the balance in its own favour. The most prominent example of such power-political sparring was the conflict that broke out over the Bavarian succession in 1778. In December 1777, the Bavarian Elector Maximilian III Joseph died, leaving no direct heirs. His successor, Charles Theodore, agreed with Vienna to exchange his prospective Bavarian inheritance for the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium), and a small contingent of Austrian troops entered Bavaria in mid-January 1778. Prussia’s first response was to demand territorial compensation – in the form of inheritance rights to the Franconian duchies of Ansbach and Bayreuth – for Austria’s acquisition of Bavaria. But Kaunitz was having none of it and refused to heed Berlin’s threats of armed intervention.

In the summer of 1778, Frederick decided to take action and entered Bohemia, aged sixty-six, at the head of a Prussian army. He now claimed to be acting on behalf of a rival heir to Bavaria, Duke Charles of Zweibrücken. In northern Bohemia Frederick found his progress blocked by a large and well-managed Austrian force. There followed long months of manoeuvring without a serious engagement, in increasingly cold and wet conditions. Frederick was eventually forced to winter his troops in the Sudeten mountains. In withering cold, Austrian and Prussian foraging parties skirmished over patches of frozen potatoes. Although the ‘Potato War’ produced no decisive engagement, Maria Theresa was keen to bring it to a swift end, even if this meant making concessions. Under the terms of the Treaty of Teschen (13 May 1779), negotiated through Russian and French mediation, she agreed not only to relinquish all of Bavaria, but also to accept Prussia’s eventual succession to the duchies of Ansbach and Bayreuth. The episode revealed the extent of Austrian unwillingness to stand alone against Frederick, a symptom of the enduring trauma inflicted by the Silesian wars and a mark of the respect in which his armed forces were now held. Equally significant was the response of the other German states. Many of these sided with Prussia, seeing Frederick as the defender of the Empire’s integrity against a predatory power play by the House of Habsburg. In 1785, when Joseph made a second attempt to trade the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, Frederick emerged once again as the defender of the Empire against the designs of the Emperor. In the summer of that year, he joined with Saxony and Hanover and a handful of lesser territories in a League of Princes (
Fürstenbund
) whose objective was to defend the Empire against the designs of the Emperor. Within eighteen months, the league counted eighteen members, including the Catholic Archbishop of Mainz, vice-chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire and traditionally a Vienna loyalist.
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The poacher had become the gamekeeper. It was a role that Frederick learned to play with great panache. Nowhere is this more evident than in his exploitation of the complex confessional machinery of the Empire. The balance between the Catholic and Protestant camps within the Empire remained a live issue in the mid and later eighteenth century. In the reigns of the Great Elector, Frederick III/I and Frederick William I, Prussia had gradually emerged as a champion of the Protestant cause within the Empire. Although his personal interest in confessional squabbles was minimal, Frederick II was an astute executor of this
tradition, successfully intervening, for example, in support of the Protestant Estates in territories whose ruling houses had converted to Catholicism (there were thirty-one such conversions between 1648 and 1769). In Hessen-Kassel (1749), Württemberg (1752), Baden-Baden (1765) and Baden-Durlach (1765), Frederick became a co-signatory and guarantor of contracts securing the rights of Protestant Estates against Catholic-convert monarchs. In such cases, he acted, with the enthusiastic support of the Protestant caucus of the imperial diet, as the supposed champion and enforcer of the rights enshrined in the Peace of Westphalia.