Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (56 page)

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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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!’
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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 imprinted 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.
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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.

Yet they had enough in common to make fruitful collaboration
possible. Both were acutely aware of the power and importance of public opinion – in this sense, they both carried the stamp of the European enlightenment. Both believed passionately in the need for structural reform at the level of the supreme executive – they had coordinated their positions on this issue during the bitter factional strife of 1806. Moreover, they were not alone: during their swift rise through the Prussian administration over more than two decades, a substantial network of younger men had coalesced around them. Some were protégésor friends, some had cut their teeth as officials in the Franconian or Westphalian administrations, and some were simply likeminded colleagues who gravitated towards the reformers as crisis loomed.

The first and in some ways the most urgent task facing the reformers was the re-establishment of Prussia as a power capable of functioning autonomously on the European stage. In addressing this problem, the reformers focused on two areas: the central decision-making executive and the military. As we have seen, there was widespread agreement among senior officials that Prussia required a more streamlined ministerial structure. A particular concern was the so-called ‘cabinet system’, in which one or more ‘foreign ministers’ competed with cabinet secretaries close to the monarch and other favoured advisers for influence over the policy-making process. This, it was claimed, was the cause of the malaise that had brought Prussia to the predicament of 1806. After his appointment in October 1807, therefore, Stein went to great pains to persuade the king to dissolve his cabinet of personal advisers, and to establish (in November 1808) a central executive consisting of five functionally defined ministries, each run by a responsible minister with direct access to the king. Taken in combination, these two measures would prevent the duplication of advisory functions between secretaries and ministers, and the appointment of multiple ‘foreign ministers’ in tandem. They would also force the king – in theory – to channel his official consultations through one responsible official, and prevent him from playing rival ministers and advisers off against each other.

Stein, Hardenberg and their collaborators naturally argued that these measures were essential if Prussia were to be restored to a condition where it could reverse the verdict of 1807. They based this claim on the presumption that the disaster of 1806–7 had been
caused
by the adversarial tensions within the executive, that it could have been avoided with a better decision-making structure capable of steering the monarch
into the required decisions. Underlying these arguments was what Carl Schmitt once called a ‘cult of the decision’: everything depended upon devising a system that was supple and transparent enough to deliver swift, rational and well-informed decisions in response to changing conditions. It was difficult to counter this argument in the emotionally charged environment of post-Tilsit Prussia.