Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (50 page)

23. Baron Karl vom und zum Stein

Stein’s originality and brilliance were quickly recognized and by 1788 he held two senior posts within the chamber administration in Kleve and the county of Mark. He purged outmoded regulations and privileges
from the fiscal system; he also suspended guild controls in the countryside, in order to stimulate rural manufacture and eliminate smuggling. The panoply of internal tolls collected by private individuals and corporations was swept away and replaced by a state-administered border tariff set at a moderate level.
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As provincial president of Minden-Ravensberg from 1796, Stein again targeted the traditional levies and privileges that muted the vitality of the local economy. He even attempted (without success) to get to grips with the problem of servile peasant status in the Westphalian lands (and particularly in Minden-Ravensberg, where many peasants were still personally unfree). As a member of the old imperial corporate nobility, Stein was reluctant to ride roughshod over local tradition and opted for a policy of negotiation with the provincial Estates. The aim was to introduce a compensation package that would reconcile the landed families to the curtailment of their seigneurial rights. These latter initiatives foundered on the bitter resistance of the nobility, but they signalled the advent of a bold new style in Prussian administration.
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Another rising civil servant with reformist ideas was Karl August von Hardenberg, who joined the Prussian administration in 1790. Like Stein, Hardenberg was a ‘foreigner’ with a deep admiration of Frederick II. Born on his maternal grandfather’s estate at Essenrode in 1750, Hardenberg hailed from a Hanoverian family of progressive reputation.
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As a civil servant in his native Hanover, the young Hardenberg became known as an outspoken reformer – a memorandum he composed in 1780 called for the abolition of servile peasant tenures, deregulation of the economy and the creation of a more streamlined executive based upon thematic ministries and clear lines of command and responsibility.
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After his transfer to Prussia, Hardenberg was entrusted, from January 1792, with the administrative integration of the newly acquired Franconian territories of Ansbach and Bayreuth.
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This was a task of great complexity, for they were criss-crossed with enclaves, exclaves and overlapping sovereignties.

Hardenberg attacked the problem with extraordinary determination and ruthlessness. The imperial nobles were shorn of their baroque privileges and constitutional rights, in flagrant breach of imperial law. Exchange agreements and jurisdictional settlements were put in place to eliminate enclaves and establish the borders as the impermeable frontiers of a homogeneous Prussian political sovereignty. The right of subjects
to bring suits before the imperial courts was abolished, thus preventing the corporate nobility in the provinces from taking their grievances to the Emperor. Where there was resistance to his orders, Hardenberg was quick to send in troops and enforce compliance. These measures were supported by an innovative approach to public opinion – Hardenberg maintained contacts with several important journals in the region and discreetly cultivated friendly writers who could be depended upon to publish articles and editorials supporting his policy.
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24
. Karl August, Prince von Hardenberg.
Marble bust by Christian Rauch, 1816.

Hardenberg had made it a condition of taking office that he would report directly to the king. He was thus a kind of viceroy in Ansbach and Bayreuth, with powers denied to his colleagues in the capital. This enabled him to push through far-reaching reforms without fear of their being sabotaged by jealous superiors. The new Franconian administration he established was structured (unlike the central government in Berlin) along modern lines: there were four thematic ministries (justice, interior, war and finance). Under Hardenberg’s leadership, the Franconian principalities became a hothouse of administrative reform in the old Prussia. Among those officials who moved sideways from the core administration to take up vacant posts in Ansbach and Bayreuth we find many of the names that later appear at the apex of the Prussian
state: Schuckmann, Koch, Kircheisen, Humboldt, Bülow. Around Hardenberg himself there gathered an eager pack of ambitious younger bureaucrats from the region. Men of the ‘Franconian clique’ would come to occupy senior administrative posts, not only in Prussia, but also in Bavaria, which later took over the principalities as a result of the Napoleonic Wars.
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Even Prussia’s time-honoured grain-management system was under growing pressure to change. The first four years of the reign of Frederick William II (r. 1786–97) saw a dramatic liberalization of the grain trade. It was a short-lived experiment – controls were gradually reimposed from 1788 onwards, to the great disappointment of liberals within the administration.
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But a chain of subsistence riots in 1800–1805 persuaded some senior officials that productivity would rise and distribution occur more efficiently if the state abandoned its controls and allowed the grain markets to function without state interference. One influential supporter of this view was the East Prussian nobleman Friedrich Leopold Freiherr von Schroetter, Prussian State Minister for East and West Prussia and vice-president of the General Directory. Schroetter was a sometime student and family friend of Immanuel Kant and a decided exponent of the agrarian liberalism that was fashionable among the East Prussian elite at the turn of the century. On 11 July 1805, he set out his views in a memorandum to the king. If subsistence riots were possible in peacetime because of failures and inefficiencies in the state system, Schroetter argued, then what could be expected if a war were to break out, and the state barges used to transport grain were needed by the army? In place of the existing regulations, Schroetter proposed a radical deregulation of the grain economy. No one, he suggested, should be obliged to sell grain against his will or at prices imposed by the government; instead of protecting the grain supply from the traders, the state should protect the traders and uphold their right to dispose freely of their property. The General Directory rejected Schroetter’s proposals in August 1805. But this was a temporary setback. In the not-so-long term, it was Schroetter’s liberalism – not the protectionism of the Directory – that would win the day.
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We can therefore speak of a process of change diffusing inwards from various points on the Prussian periphery.
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In the 1790s, the decade of revolution in Europe, Prussia seemed to be poised between two worlds. The expansion of critical print that had taken place during the last third
of the century presented the administration with a phenomenon that it could neither repress nor fully accept. The flowering of Prussian monarchical patriotism expressed an ambition among the emergent urban intelligentsia to participate in the great matters of the state for which there was as yet no outlet in Prussia’s governmental system. Debate and critical discussion within and outside the administration had raised questions about virtually every domain of the political system – from the power structures of agrarian society, to the organization and tactics of the military, to the state’s management of the economy.

No single text better documents the transitional condition of Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century than the General Law Code published in 1794. With its almost 20,000 paragraphs that seem to spy into the foundations of every conceivable transaction between one Prussian and another, the General Code was the greatest civilian achievement of the Frederician enlightenment. Drawn up by a team of brilliant jurists following a long process of public debate and consultation, it was without parallel at the time of its publication; only in 1804 and 1811 did France and Austria follow with similar, if less comprehensive, codices. It was also exemplary for the clarity and elegance of its language, which articulated key axioms with such lucidity and precision that many rhetorical fragments of the Prussian code survive in the civil law of today’s Germany.
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The fascination of the General Code lies in the curiously unresolved portrait it offers of Prussian society at the end of the eighteenth century. Peering at Prussia through its paragraphs is like using a pair of binoculars with different focal lengths. On the one hand, there are glimpses of an egalitarian socio-legal order. The very first paragraph announced that ‘the General Law Code contains the rules by which the rights and obligations of the residents of the state [… ] are to be assessed.’
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The reader is immediately struck by the choice of the latently egalitarian term ‘residents’ (
Einwohner
) in place of the more traditional ‘subjects’ (
Untertanen
), and this impression is reinforced by §22, which declares that ‘the laws of the state bind all members thereof, without regard to their Estate, rank or gender.’
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Here, the notion of ‘membership’ of the state is substituted for subjecthood and the egalitarian intention is made more explicit. At §82 of the Introduction, however, we are told that ‘the rights of the individual’ are a function, all else being equal, of ‘his birth [and] his Estate’; in a later section dealing with the ‘obligations and
rights of the noble Estate’ the code states baldly that ‘the nobility is the first Estate in the State’ whose chief vocation and task is the defence thereof. Further paragraphs in the same section stipulate that members of the noble Estate are to be tried only by the highest courts in the land, that nobles enjoy privileged access (assuming adequate qualifications) to the ‘places of honour in the State’ and that ‘only the nobility is entitled to the ownership of noble landed estates.’
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These discrepancies seemed less mysterious to contemporaries than they do to us. For Frederick II, who gave the order to begin this great work of codification, the primacy of the nobility was an axiom of the social order and he ordered his jurists to consider not only the ‘general good’ but also the specific entitlements of the Estates – this element was further strengthened after his death.
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The ambivalence that resulted can be discerned in the paragraphs covering the rights and obligations of peasant subjects on the noble landed estates. Amazingly, the law characterizes these persons as ‘free citizens of the State’ (
freye Bürger des Staates
) – indeed the subject peasants are the only group to enjoy this distinction. Yet the bulk of the paragraphs on this topic reinforce the existing structures of corporate domination and inequality in the countryside. Subjects must gain the permission of the lordship before marrying (though, on the other hand, this cannot be refused without good legal reason); their children must offer domestic service; they must suffer (moderate) punishments for misdemeanours; they must render their services as required under law, and so on.
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The corporate structures of Prussian society were seen as so fundamental to the social order that they structured the law, rather than being defined by it; indeed they were ‘sources of the law’, as one of the titles in the preamble to the code puts it.
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What is really interesting about the General Code is not that these disparate perspectives exist within it, but that neither seems reducible to the other. The code looks backwards to a world already of the past, a world where each order has its place in relation to the state, a world that seemed rooted in the Middle Ages but had in fact been invented by Frederick the Great and was already dissolving when the work of codification drew to a close. But it also anticipates a world where all citizens are ‘free’, the state is sovereign, and kings and governments are bound by the law; indeed some historians have seen the code as a kind of proto-constitution guaranteeing the rule of law.
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The nineteenth
century historian Heinrich Treitschke highlighted these inner tensions when he observed that the code captured ‘the Janus-headedness’ of the Frederician state.
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He borrowed the idea from Madame de Staël, who observed that ‘the image of Prussia offers a double face, like that of Janus, one of which is military, the other philosophical.’
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The metaphor of the two-faced Roman god of thresholds caught on, metastasizing wildly across the historiography of Prussia until the point (in the 1970s and 1980s), when it seemed impossible to write anything at all about Prussia without pouring a libation to Janus. It was as if the divided gaze of the two-faced god captured something fundamental about the Prussian experience, a polarity between tradition and innovation that defined the historical trajectory of the Hohenzollern state.