Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (59 page)

The emancipated citizens who emerged from every level of Humboldt’s educational system were expected to take an active part in the political life of the Prussian state. Stein hoped to achieve this through
the creation of elected organs of municipal self-government that would encourage more active participation in matters of public interest. Shortly before his departure from office, the ministry enacted the Municipal Ordinance (
Städteordnung
) of November 1808. The category of ‘citizen’ (
Bürger
), once largely confined to the privileged members of corporate bodies such as guilds, was enlarged to include all persons owning a house (including single women) or practising a ‘municipal trade’ within the city limits. All male citizens who satisfied a modest property qualification were entitled to vote in town elections and to hold municipal office. The equivalence asserted here between ownership (
Teilhabe
) and participation (
Teilnahme
) would form an enduring theme in the history of nineteenth-century liberalism.

The same project – the engagement of citizens as active participants in public affairs – was mapped on to the kingdom as a whole during Hardenberg’s period in office. The background to this remarkable experiment in popular participation, which went beyond the programmes envisaged by most of the pre-1806 enlightened reformers, was a major fiscal crisis. In 1810, Napoleon renewed his demand for payment of the war indemnity and offered the Dohna-Altenstein ministry the choice between paying up and ceding a chunk of Silesia. When the ministers considered taking the latter course, Frederick William III relieved them of their duties and appointed Hardenberg who promised to meet the French bill through radical fiscal reform. State debt was rising fast, from 35 million thalers in 1806 to 66 million in 1810, and the debasement of the coinage, the issue of new paper money and the raising of loans at high rates of interest were feeding an inflationary spiral.

To prevent a further deterioration, Hardenberg fired off a salvo of edicts announcing major fiscal and economic reforms. Tax burdens were to be equalized through the imposition of a ‘territorial consumption tax’, the freedom of enterprise heralded in the October Edict and the Municipal Ordinance was to be put into effect across the kingdom, church and state properties were to be sold off and the tariff and toll systems were to be thoroughly overhauled and rationalized. In order to ease these controversial proposals through the system, in February 1811 the chancellor convened an Assembly of Notables comprising sixty persons nominated by various regional and local elites, and informed them that they were to regard themselves as ‘representatives of the whole nation’ whose help would be needed in the establishment of a free
and equal Prussian society.
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The aim, as Hardenberg had put it in a memorandum of March 1809, was to find a way of extracting the needed funds without damaging ‘the bond of love and trust between the government and the people’. By imposing new taxes, as it were, upon themselves, the assembly would ‘spare the monarch the pain of demanding a grievous sacrifice, diminish ill-feeling among the citizens of the state, give these a degree of control over the details of implementation, prove their patriotism and enliven the necessary commitment to the common good’.
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In the event, the assembly – like so many historic assemblies convened for the same purpose – was a disappointment. Hardenberg had hoped that the public-spirited members of this gathering would offer constructive advice on how to implement the necessary changes and develop further innovations, before packing their bags and returning to their provinces as propagandists for the government. Instead the representatives loudly voiced their objections to Hardenberg’s plans and the assembly became a forum for anti-reformist opinion. It was quickly dissolved. The same problem dogged the modestly named ‘interim national representations’ elected by local government assemblies and convened by the chancellor in 1812 and 1814. In retrospect, it seems unlikely that Hardenberg could ever have made a success of these pseudo-democratic assemblies. He had no intention in the first instance of allowing them to assume the powers of a fully fledged parliament; their function was to be consultative. They were to be conduits of understanding between the government and the nation. Here was the enlightenment dream of a reasoned ‘conversation’ between state and civil society writ large.

However, as the assembly and the two interim representations revealed, this congenial vision did not provide suitable mechanisms for the public conciliation of opposed social and economic interests in a period of heightened conflict and crisis. Hardenberg’s experiments with representation illustrated a problem at the heart of the reform project, namely that where government action was controversial, the rituals of participation tended to focus and reinforce opposition rather than building consensus. The same problem could be observed in the cities, where the assemblies created by Stein often emerged as opponents of reforming measures.
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Among those who benefited from the efforts to create a more free,
equal and politically coherent society of citizens were the Jews of the Prussian lands. Despite a partial easing of controls for the most privileged strata under Frederick William II, the Prussian Jews were still subject to many special restrictions and their affairs were administered under a particular jurisdiction. The first signals of a more comprehensive reform came with the cities ordinance of 1808, which allowed ‘protected, property-owning Jews’ to vote and hold municipal offices as members of town and city councils. It was thanks to this liberalizing measure that David Friedländer, a disciple of Mendelssohn, became the first Jew to hold a seat on the Berlin council. Yet the idea of a comprehensive emancipation remained controversial within the administration.
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In 1809, the task of drafting a proposal on the future status of the Jews was entrusted to Friedrich von Schroetter. Schroetter suggested a gradualist approach, beginning with the piecemeal removal of restrictions and proceeding by slow stages to the concession of full citizenship rights. His draft was circulated to the various government departments for comments.

Responses from within the administration were mixed. The conservatives who controlled the ministry of finance insisted that emancipation must be conditional upon the abandonment of all ritual observance and the cessation of Jewish trading activity. Far more liberal was the reply from Wilhelm von Humboldt. He pleaded for a clean separation of church and state; in a state organized along secular lines, he argued, the religion of the individual citizen must be a purely private affair without consequences for the exercise of citizenship rights. Yet even Humboldt took the view that emancipation would eventually lead to the voluntary self-dissolution of Judaism. ‘Since they are driven by an innate human need for a higher faith’, he argued, the Jews will ‘turn of their own free will to the Christian [religion]’.
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Both viewpoints presumed – much as Dohm had done over twenty years before – that emancipation would entail the ‘education’ of the Jews away from their faith and habits towards a higher social and religious order. The difference was that Humboldt imagined this process as a voluntary consequence of emancipation, while the officials of the ministry of finance saw it as a state-imposed precondition.

The emancipation proposal might well have mouldered away in the archives until after the Napoleonic Wars if Hardenberg had not taken the matter up following his appointment as chancellor on 6 July 1810.
Hardenberg was favourable in principle to a general emancipation, but there was also a personal dimension to his advocacy. He had been a frequent guest at the Jewish salons of the 1790s and early 1800s and counted many Jews among his friends and associates. When Hardenberg had fallen into debt at the time of his divorce from his first wife, it was the Westphalian court banker Israel Jacobson – a passionate advocate of Jewish religious reform and of emancipation – who bailed him out with a low-interest loan. David Friedländer, who had moved in the same circles as Hardenberg, was asked to submit a memorandum setting out the community’s case for emancipation – it was the first time a Jew had been involved in official consultations over a Prussian matter of state. The result of Hardenberg’s canvassing and deliberation was the Edict Concerning the Civil Condition of the Jews in the Prussian State of 11 March 1812, which declared that all Jews resident in Prussia and in possession of general privileges, naturalization certificates, letters of protection, or special concessions should henceforth be regarded as ‘natives’ (
Einländer
) and ‘citizens’ (
Staatsbürger
) of the state of Prussia. The edict lifted all prior restrictions on Jewish commercial and occupational activity, swept away all special taxes and levies, and established that Jews were free to live where they wished and to marry whom they chose (although mixed marriages between Jews and Christians remained inadmissible).

These rulings certainly amounted to a major improvement, and they were duly celebrated by an enlightened Jewish journal based in Berlin as the inauguration of a ‘new and happy era’.
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The Jewish Elders of Berlin thanked Hardenberg for his good works, expressing their ‘deepest gratitude’ for this ‘immeasurable act of charity’.
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However, the emancipation made available by the edict was limited in several important respects. Most importantly, it postponed judgement on the question of whether positions in government service would be made available to Jewish applicants. It thus fell crucially short of the French emancipation of 1791, which had embedded Jewish entitlements in a universal endorsement of citizenship and political rights. By contrast, the language of the Prussian edict, which warned that the ‘continuation of their allotted title of inhabitants and citizens of the state’ would depend on the fulfilment of certain prior obligations, made it clear that the edict was about the concession of status rather than the recognition of rights.
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In this respect, it echoed the ambivalence of Dohm’s famous tract on
the ‘civil improvement’ of the Jews. The majority of the reformers shared Dohm’s view that it would take time before the negative effects of discrimination wore off and the Jews were ready to take their place as equal participants in the public life of the nation. As one Prussian official put it: ‘repression had made the Jews treacherous’ and the ‘sudden concession of liberty’ would not suffice to ‘reconstitute all at once the natural human nobility within them’.
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The edict thus stripped away much ancient discriminatory law without completing the work of political emancipation, which was seen as a process that would take a generation or so to accomplish.

In the course of the nineteenth century, a nimbus of myth shrouded the era of Prussian reform establishing Stein, Hardenberg, Scharnhorst and their colleagues as the authors of a momentous revolution from above. If we look more closely at what was actually accomplished, however, the achievements of the reformers look rather modest. Subtract the propagandistic sound and fury of the edicts, and we might merely be looking at one energetic episode within a
longue durée
of Prussian administrative change between the 1790s and the 1840s.
⁵⁵

The reforms were not directed towards a single agreed objective, and many of the most important proposals were muted, held up or blocked altogether by bitter contention among the reformers themselves.
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Take, for example, the plan to abolish patrimonial powers on the manorial estates. Stein and his ministers were determined from the very beginning to do away with these jurisdictions, on the grounds that they were ‘out of tune with the cultural condition of the nation’ and thus undermined popular attachments to ‘the state in which we live’.
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Hardenberg and his associate Altenstein, by contrast, took the view that the government must consider the interests of the landowners. And so the issue remained in contention, losing much of its urgency after Napoleon forced Stein’s dismissal in 1808. Determined opposition from the nobility, especially in East Prussia, where corporate identities remained strong, helped to slow the process further, as did peasant unrest, a sobering reminder of the need for flexible and authoritative judicial organs on the land.
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Then there was the fiscal crisis of 1810; the desperate shortage of cash
was yet a further reason for avoiding a costly ‘total revision’ of rural justice – an example of how the burdens of war and occupation could interrupt as well as motivate the work of reform.
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These factors in combination sufficed to drive the abolition of the patrimonial courts off the government’s agenda.

The same fate befell the Gendarmerie Edict of 30 July 1812, which foresaw the imposition of a bureaucratized system of rural government on the French model and the creation of a paramilitary state police for all rural areas. The plan was first sketched out during Stein’s period in office. Pressed to act by the director of the General Police Department in Berlin, Hardenberg entrusted the drafting of a law to his old Franconian protégé Christian Friedrich Scharnweber. Scharnweber embedded the formation of a new state police force within a thorough transformation of the Prussian administration. Under the terms of the edict, the entire surface of Prussia (with the exception of the seven largest cities) was to be divided into districts (
Kreise
) of even size with a uniform administration incorporating an element of local representation.
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The Gendarmerie Edict was one of the most uncompromising reformist statements of the Hardenberg era; had it succeeded, it would have swept away much of the lumpy, cellular, old-regime structure of rural governance in the kingdom.