Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (60 page)

In fact, however, the edict met with a storm of protest and widespread civil disobedience from the rural nobility (especially in East Prussia) and from conservative members of the administration. The noble-dominated interim national representation meeting in Berlin during 1812 saw the Gendarmerie Edict as yet another attempt to rob the landowning nobility of its traditional rights and passed a motion rejecting any suspension of patrimonial jurisdictions – a copy book example of how participation and reform were not always compatible.
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Two years later, after further arguments within the administration, the Gendarmerie Edict was suspended. Further efforts to subordinate all forms of rural local government to centralized state authority during the last years of the Hardenberg administration foundered, with the result that right up into the early years of the Weimar Republic, Prussia’s arrangements for rural administration remained among the most antiquated in Germany.
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Fear of a political backlash from the nobility also discouraged the reformers from attempting a more radical overhaul of the taxation system. Hardenberg had promised to equalize the land tax and remove
the many exemptions that still benefited the rural nobility. He had also spoken of introducing a permanent income tax. But these plans were renounced in the face of corporate noble protests. Instead the Prussians were saddled with an array of consumption taxes that weighed most heavily on the poorest strata. The government returned to the question of land tax reform in 1817 and again in 1820, but the promised reform never materialized.
⁶³

Perhaps the greatest disappointment was the failure of the reformers to establish an organ of all-Prussian representation for the kingdom. Hardenberg’s finance edict of 27 October 1810 announced that the king intended to establish an ‘appropriately constituted representation both in the provinces and for the whole [of the kingdom], whose advice we will gladly use’.
⁶⁴
Under pressure from his ministers, the king renewed this promise in the Ordinance Concerning the Future Representation of the People, published on 22 May 1815. The ordinance reiterated that the government intended to establish ‘provincial estates’ (
Provinzialstände
) and to form out of these a ‘Territorial Representation’ (
Landes-Representation
), whose seat would be in Berlin. Yet no national parliament was forthcoming. Instead the Prussians had to make do with provincial diets established after Hardenberg’s death under a General Law published on 5 June 1823. These were not the robust modern representative bodies the most radical among the reformers had wished for. They were elected and organized along corporate lines and their areas of competence were very narrowly defined.

One way of casting the specificity of Prussian developments into sharper relief is to set them in the broader context of reformist activity in the German states during the Napoleonic era. Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria all passed through a period of intensified bureaucratic reform during these years, yet the result was a substantially greater measure of constitutional reform: all three states received constitutions, territorial elections and parliaments whose assent was required for the passage of legislation. Seen in this company, the neo-corporate provincial diets established in Prussia after 1823 look decidedly unimpressive. On the other hand, the Prussians were far more radical and consistent in their modernization of the economy. While the reformers in Munich and Stuttgart remained wedded to the protectionist mechanisms of old-regime mercantilism, the Prussians aimed at deregulation – of commerce, of manufacture, of the labour market, of internal trade – eloquent
testimony to the cultural and geoeconomic effects of Prussia’s relative proximity to the markets of industrializing Britain. Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria launched reforms of comparable scope only in 1862, 1862 and 1868 respectively. The momentum of Prussian economic reform carried on long after 1815 into the great customs unions of the post-war era. Prussia thus emerged from the Napoleonic era with a rather less ‘modern’ constitutional system than the three southern states, but a rather more ‘modern’ political economy.
⁶⁵

How we judge the achievement of the reformers depends upon whether we emphasize what was accomplished, or whether we focus instead upon the still unmastered legacy of the past. One can highlight the ways in which estate-owners benefited from the compensation arrangements imposed by Hardenberg’s various revisions to Stein’s Emancipation Edict. Alternatively, one can point to the size and prosperity of the peasant small- and middle-holding class that emerged from the partitioning of the landed estates.
⁶⁶
The liberal Humboldtian pedagogy of the Prussian primary schools was diluted after 1819, yet the Prussian school system was internationally admired for the humanity of its ethos and the quality of its output. The Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, with its powerful institutional commitment to the freedom of research, became a model admired across Europe and widely emulated in the United States, where Humboldt’s prescriptions helped to establish the idea of a modern academy.
⁶⁷
It is perfectly legitimate to underline the limits of what was on offer in the Jewish Emancipation Edict of 1812, but important, too, to acknowledge its central place in the history of Jewish emancipation in nineteenth-century Germany.
⁶⁸
One can lament the failure of the reformers to do away with patrimonial jurisdictions in the countryside, or one can focus instead on the societal forces that transformed the patrimonial courts into legal instruments of the state during the decade after 1815.
⁶⁹

In other ways, too, the reformers endorsed and reinforced a momentum for change that would prove irreversible after 1815. The Council of State (
Staatsrat
) established in 1817 may not have enjoyed the fullness of power Stein had once envisaged for it, but it did come to play a crucial role in the formulation of laws. The resulting ministerialization of government tended, in practice if not in theory, to limit the independence of the monarch and reinforce the power of the ministerial bureaucracies.
⁷⁰
Ministers were far more authoritative figures after 1815 than
they had been in the 1780s and 1790s. The provincial diets, despite their limitations, ultimately became important platforms for political opposition.

No single edict better illustrates the long-term impact of the reforms than the State Indebtedness Law of 17 January 1820, one of Hardenberg’s last and most important legislative achievements. The text of the law began by declaring that the current Prussian state debt (of just over 180 million thalers) was to be regarded as ‘a closed [account] for all time’ and went on to announce that if the state should in future be obliged to raise a new loan, this could take place only with the ‘involvement and co-guarantee of the future national assembly’. By means of this law, Hardenberg planted a constitutional time-bomb within the fabric of the Prussian state. It would tick away quietly until 1847, when the unforeseen financial demands of the dawning railway age would force the government to summon a United Diet in Berlin, opening the door to revolution.

The reforms were above all acts of communication. The propagandistic, exalted tone of the edicts was something new; the October Edict in particular was a remarkable piece of plebiscitary rhetoric. Prussian governments had never spoken to the public in this way before. The most innovative figure in this domain was Hardenberg, who adopted a pragmatic but respectful attitude to public opinion as a factor in the success of government initiatives. During his ministry in Ansbach and Bayreuth, he did his best to meet security needs without undermining ‘the freedom to think and to express one’s opinions publicly’. His famous Riga Memorandum of 1807 stressed the value of a cooperative, rather than antagonistic, relationship between the state and public opinion, and argued that governments should not shrink from ‘winning over opinion’ through the use of ‘good writers’. It was Chancellor Hardenberg who in 1810–11 pioneered the regular, annotated publication of new legislation, arguing that this departure from the secretive practice of earlier governments would strengthen trust in the administration. Particularly innovative was his engagement of freelance writers and editors as propagandists in the service of the state.
⁷¹

One little-known but highly emblematic initiative in which Hardenberg was involved was the reform of the old chancellery style in official communications. This issue first came to the fore in March 1800, when it was proposed that the long-winded
nomine regis
starting with
the words ‘We Frederick William III’ and listing all the king’s titles in descending order of importance, should be omitted from the header of government documents. When the matter was discussed in the state ministry on 7 April 1800, virtually all of the ministers were opposed, arguing that removal of the full title would diminish the authority of utterances stemming from the government. But on the following day Hardenberg submitted a separate judgement expressing his support for a much more radical reform to the language of public and official communications. The chancellery style that was currently used, he wrote, was that of a ‘bygone age’; but whereas the age had changed, ‘[the style] has remained’. There was thus no reason why the state authority should maintain the ‘barbaric written style of an uneducated era’. Little came of this spirited intervention in 1800, but ten years later, the
nomine regis
was abolished by a law of 27 October 1810 that carried Hardenberg’s and the king’s signatures.
⁷²

This apparently trifling innovation takes us to the heart of what Hardenberg’s reform project was about. What concerned him above all – and the same is true for many of the older reformers – was transparency and communication. In this sense, Hardenberg was not a liberal, but a man of the enlightenment. He did not recognize public opinion as an
autonomous
force whose role was to check or oppose the state. Nor did he (or Stein, for that matter) have any intention of consolidating the ‘liberal public sphere’ as a domain of critical discourse.
⁷³
He wanted to make such opposition unnecessary and unthinkable by opening the channels of understanding, by embracing the educated public in a harmonious conversation about the general good. This was the logic behind the Assembly of Notables and the national interim representations, the exalted, captivating language of the decrees and the endless government publications. It also explains his willingness to apply censorship when he deemed it necessary.
⁷⁴

What Hardenberg overlooked was that words have a life of their own. When he said ‘representation’, he had in mind compliant and virtuous bodies of worthies conveying information and ideas between the province and the metropolis, but others were thinking of corporate interests, or of parliaments and constitutional monarchy. When he said ‘participation’, he meant co-option and consultation, but others meant co-determination and the power to check government. When he said ‘nation’, he meant the politically conscious people of Prussia, but others
were thinking of a wider German nation, whose interests and fate were not necessarily identical with those of Prussia. This is one of the reasons why the reform era seems at once so rich in promise and so poor in achievements. There are parallels here with another beleaguered historical figure, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev was a man of reform and transparency (
glasnost
), not of revolutionary transformation. His aim, and Hardenberg’s, was to adjust the state system to the needs of the present. But it would be churlish to deny either man his part in the changes that lay ahead.

In the spring of 1809, it seemed that the tide might at last be turning against Napoleon. The news that bands of freedom fighters were harrying the French armies in the Iberian Peninsula stirred excitement throughout Prussia. In the second week of April came reports that Emperor Francis I of Austria, goaded into action by the installation of Joseph Bonaparte on the Bourbon throne of Spain, had gone to war against Napoleon. The Emperor’s chief minister Count Stadion hoped to enlist German popular support, and Austrian campaign propaganda duly exhorted Germans in all states to rise up against the French. On 11 April, a massive peasant uprising in the Tyrol under the leadership of the wine merchant Andreas Hofer succeeded in driving out the Bavarians, allies of the French, who had presented them with the formerly Austrian Tyrol only four years earlier.

To many Prussians, it seemed that the moment was right for Prussia, too, to rise up against the invader. ‘The general mood,’ Provincial President Johann August Sack reported from Berlin, ‘is that now or never is the moment when salvation from dependence and subjection is possible.’
¹
Once again, the king was confronted with impossible choices. Vienna pressed for Prussian support, urging that the two states coordinate their military planning and strike against France together. Meanwhile, the French reminded Frederick William that under the terms of the Franco-Prussian treaty of 8 September 1808, Prussia was obliged to support France with an auxiliary corps of 12,000 men. The Russians were noncommittal. They seemed unenthusiastic about the Austrian campaign and unwilling to offer assurances. The king quickly gravitated towards his default position: even before the hostilities had begun,
he had concluded that it was best for Prussia to ‘sit tight in the first instance’.
²

As in 1805–6, the foreign-policy dilemma facing the state polarized the most influential figures around the monarch. Some argued that it would be suicidal for Prussia to undertake any initiative against France without Russian support. Others, including the leading military reformers, Foreign Minister August Friedrich Ferdinand von der Goltz and Minister of Justice Karl Friedrich Beyme, pressed for an alliance with Austria.
³
But the king clung stubbornly to a policy of inaction. His strategy was to avoid any move that might incur the complete extinction of his state. Reputation and honour were unaffordable luxuries; survival was all. ‘A political existence of some kind, no matter how small it be, is better than none, and then [… ] at least some hope remains for the future, but none would remain if Prussia disappeared entirely from the community of states, which will very likely be the case if it shows its hand before the time is right.’
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