Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

  To finance this amalgam of feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and autocracy Frederick drew from his people in taxation almost as much as he returned to them in social order, subsidies, and public works. He kept for the state a monopoly on salt, sugar, tobacco, and (after 1781) coffee, and he owned a third of the arable land.35 He taxed everything, even street singers, and brought in Helvétius to devise an inescapable system of taxgathering. “The new projects of excise [taxation!,” wrote an English ambassador, “have really alienated the affections of the people from their sovereign.”36 At his death Frederick left in the treasury 51,000,000 thalers—two and a half times the annual revenue of the state.

  Mirabeau fils, having made three visits to Berlin, published in 1788 a devastating analysis De la Monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand. Inheriting from his father the free-enterprise principles of the physiocrats, he condemned the Frederician regime as a police state, a bureaucracy choking all initiative and invading every privacy. Frederick might have replied that in the chaotic condition of Prussia after the Seven Years’ War laissez-faire would have annulled his victory with economic anarchy. Direction was imperative; he was the only one who could effectively command; and he knew no other form of command than that of a general to his troops. He saved Prussia from defeat and collapse, and paid by losing the love of his people. He realized this result, and comforted himself with righteousness:

  Mankind move if you urge them on, and stop as soon as you leave off driving them. … Men read little, and have no desire to learn how anything can be managed differently. As for me, who never did them anything but good, they think that I want to put a knife to their throats, so soon as there is any question of introducing a useful improvement, or, indeed, any change at all. In such cases I have relied on my honest purpose and my good conscience, and on the information in my possession, and have calmly pursued my way.37

  His will prevailed. Prussia, even in his lifetime, grew rich and strong. Population doubled, education spread, religious intolerance hid its head. It is true that this new order depended upon enlightened despotism, and that when, after Frederick’s death, the despotism remained without the enlightenment, the national structure was weakened and collapsed at Jena before a will as strong as Frederick’s own. But the Napoleonic edifice too, depending upon one will and brain, collapsed; and in the long run it was Frederick’s distant heir and beneficiary Bismarck who chastened the France of Napoleon’s heir, and made from Prussia and a hundred principalities a united and powerful Germany.

  III. THE PRINCIPALITIES

  We remind ourselves again that in the eighteenth century Germany was not a nation but a loose federation of nearly independent states, which formally accepted the “Holy Roman” emperor at Vienna as their head, and sent representatives occasionally to a Reichstag, or Imperial Diet, whose chief functions were to hear speeches, suffer ceremonies, and elect an emperor. The states had a common language, literature, and art, but differed in manners, dress, coinage, and creed. There were some advantages in this political fragmentation: the multiplicity of princely courts favored a stimulating diversity of cultures; the armies were small, instead of being united for the terror of Europe; and a considerable degree of tolerance in religion, custom, and law was forced upon state, church, and people by the ease of emigration. Theoretically the power of each prince was absolute, for the Protestant faith sanctioned the “divine right of kings.” Frederick, who recognized no divine right but that of his army, satirized “most small princes, particularly German ones,” who “ruin themselves by reckless extravagance, misled by the illusion of their imagined greatness. … The youngest son of the youngest son of an appanaged dynasty imagines he is of the same stamp as Louis XIV. He builds his Versailles, keeps mistresses, and has an army … strong enough to fight … a battle on the stage of Verona.”38

  The most important of the principalities was Saxony. Its age of art and glory ended when Elector Frederick Augustus II allied himself with Maria Theresa against Frederick the Great; the merciless King bombarded and ruined Dresden in 1760; the Elector fled to Poland as its Augustus III, and died in 1763. His grandson Frederick Augustus III inherited the electorate at the age of thirteen, earned the name of “Der Gerechte” (The Just), made Saxony a kingdom (1806), and through many vicissitudes kept his throne till his death (1827).

  Karl Eugen, duke of Württemberg, comes into our story chiefly as the friend and enemy of Schiller. He taxed his subjects with inexhaustible ingenuity, sold ten thousand of his troops to France, and maintained what Casanova thought “the most brilliant court in Europe,”39 with a French theater, Italian opera, and a concatenation of concubines. More important to our narrative is Karl August, reigning duke of Saxe-Weimar from 1775 to 1828; but we shall see him to better advantage surrounded by the stars who brightened his reign—Wieland, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller. He was one of several minor “enlightened despots” who in this age, feeling the influence of Voltaire and the example of Frederick, contributed to the awakening of Germany. The archbishops who ruled Münster, Cologne, Trier, Mainz, and Würzburg-Bamberg fell in line by multiplying schools and hospitals, checking court extravagance, softening class distinctions, reforming prisons, extending poor relief, and bettering the conditions of industry and trade. “It is not easy,” wrote Edmund Burke, “to find or to conceive governments more mild and indulgent than these church sovereignties.”40

  Class distinctions, however, were emphasized in most of the German states, as part of the technique of social control. Nobles, clergy, army officers, professional men, merchants, and peasants constituted separate classes; and within every category there were grades each of which stiffened itself with scorn of the next beneath. Marriage outside one’s class was almost unthinkable, but some merchants and financiers bought nobility. The nobles held a monopoly of the higher posts in the army and the government, and many of them earned their privileges by bravery or competence; but many were parasites, composed of uniforms, competing for social precedence at the court, and following French fashions in language, philosophy, and mistresses.

  It is to the credit of the princes, prelates, and nobles of western Germany that by 1780 they had freed their peasants from serfdom, and on terms that made possible a wide spread of rural prosperity. Reinhold Lenz thought the peasants finer human beings—simpler, heartier, more elemental—than the penny-counting tradesmen or the prancing young aristocrats.41 Heinrich Jung’s autobiography (1777) idealized village life in its daily labor as well as its seasonal festivals; Herder found the folk songs of the peasantry to be truer and profounder than the poetry of the books; and Goethe, in his Dichtung und Wahrheit, described the vintage celebration as “pervading a whole district with jubilation,” fireworks, song, and wine.42 This was one side of the German scene; the other was hard labor, high taxes, women old at thirty, illiterate children dressed in rags and begging in the streets. “At one station,” Eva König told Lessing in 1770, “there crowded around me … eighty beggars; … in Munich whole families ran after me, exclaiming that surely one would not let them starve.”43

  In the eighteenth century the family was more important than the state or the school. The German home was the source and center of moral discipline, social order, and economic activity. There the child learned to obey a stern father, take refuge with a loving mother, and share at an early age in the diverse and formative tasks that filled the day. Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” gave an ideal picture of “the housewife so modest, … wisely governing the circle of the family, training the girls, restraining the boys, and using all spare moments to ply the loom.”44 The wife was subject to the husband, but she was the idol of her children. Outside the home, except at the courts, men usually excluded women from their social life, and so their conversation tended to be either dull or profane. At the courts there were many women of culture and fine manners; some, Eckermann thought, “write an excellent style, and surpass, in that respect, many of our most celebrated authors.”45 As in France, so in Ger
many, the women of the upper classes had to learn swooning as part of their technique, and a readiness for sentiment melting into tears.

  Court morals followed French models in drinking, gambling, adultery, and divorce. Titled ladies, according to Mme. de Staël, changed husbands “with as little difficulty as if they were arranging the incidents of a drama,” and with “little bitterness of spirit.”46 The princes set the pace for immorality by selling their soldiers to foreign rulers; so the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel built an elegant palace, and maintained a sumptuous court, from the proceeds of his Soldatenhandel —commerce in soldiery. Altogether, during the American Revolution, German princes sold—or, as they put it, “lent”—thirty thousand troops to England for some £500,000; 12,500 of these men never returned.47 Outside of Prussia the Germans of the eighteenth century—recalling the horrors of the seventeenth—showed little inclination to war. Apparently “national character” can change from one century to another.

  Religion in Germany was more subordinate to the state than in Catholic lands. Divided into sects, it had no awesome pontiff to co-ordinate its doctrine, strategy and defense; its leaders were appointed by the prince, its income depended upon his will. In the middle and lower classes it was a strong faith; only the nobles, the intellectuals, and a few clergymen were affected by the waves of unbelief that swept in from England and France. The Rhine region was mostly Catholic, but it was there that this period saw the rise of a movement boldly challenging the authority of the popes.

  In 1763 Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim, auxiliary bishop of Trier, published, under the pseudonym Justinus Febronius, a treatise De Statu Ec-clesiae et legitima Potestate romani Pontificis (On the State of the Church, and the Legitimate Power of the Roman Pontiff) . The book was translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, and made a stir throughout Western Europe. “Febronius” accepted the primacy of the pope, but only as one of honor and executive administration; the pope is not infallible; appeal should be possible from his decision to a general council, which should have the ultimate legislative authority in the Church. The author distrusted the secret conservative influence of the Roman Curia, and suggested that the excessive centralization of ecclesiastical power had produced the Reformation; decentralization might ease the return of Protestants to the Catholic Church. In matters of human, not divine, law secular princes were entitled to refuse obedience to the papacy; if necessary, they might rightfully separate their national churches from Rome. The Pope condemned the book (February, 1764), but it became “the breviary of the governments.”48 We have seen its influence on Joseph II.

  The archbishops of Cologne, Trier, Mainz, and Salzburg favored the views of “Febronius”; they wished to be independent of the pope as the other principalities were of the emperor. On September 25, 1786, they issued the “Punctation [preliminary statement] of Ems” (near Coblenz), which, if it had been put into effect, would have created a new Reformation:

  The pope is and remains the highest authority in the Church, … but those [papal] privileges which do not spring from the first Christian centuries but are based on the false Isadoran Decretals, and are disadvantageous to the bishops, … can no longer be considered valid; they belong among the usurpations of the Roman Curia; and the bishops are entitled (since peaceful protests are of no avail) themselves to maintain their lawful rights under the protection of the Roman-German Emperor. There should no longer be any appeals [from the bishops] to Rome. … The [religious] orders should take no directions from foreign superiors, nor attend general councils outside Germany. No contributions should be sent to Rome. … Vacant benefices should be filled not by Rome but by a regular election of native candidates.... A German national council should regulate these and other matters.49

  The German bishops, fearing the financial power of the Curia, gave no support to this declaration; moreover, they hesitated to replace the distant over-lordship of Rome with the immediate and less evadable authority of the German princes. The incipient revolt collapsed; Hontheim retracted (1788); the archbishops withdrew their “punctation” (1789), and all was as before.

  IV. THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT

  Not quite. Education, except in the ecclesiastical principalities, had passed from church to state control. University professors were appointed and paid (with shameful parsimony) by the government, and held the status of public officials. Although all teachers and students were required to subscribe to the religion of the prince, the faculties, until 1789, enjoyed a growing measure of academic freedom. German replaced Latin as the language of instruction. Courses in science and philosophy multiplied, and philosophy was spaciously defined (at the University of Königsberg in Kant’s day) as “the ability to think, and to investigate the nature of things without prejudices or sectarianism.”50 Karl von Zedlitz, the devoted Minister of Education under Frederick the Great, asked Kant to suggest means of “holding back the students in the universities from the bread-and-butter studies, and making them understand that their modicum of law, even their theology and medicine, will be much more easily acquired and safely applied if they are in possession of philosophical knowledge.”51

  Many poor students obtained public or private aid for a university education; pleasant is Eckermann’s story of how he was helped by kind neighbors at every step of his development.52 There were no class distinctions in the student body.53 Any graduate was allowed to lecture under university auspices, for whatever fees he could collect from his auditors; Kant began his professorial career in this way; and such competition from new teachers kept old pundits on their toes. Mme. de Staël judged the twenty-four German universities to be “the most learned in Europe. In no country, not even England, are there so many means of instruction, or of bringing one’s capacities to perfection. … Since the Reformation the Protestant universities have been incontestably superior to the Catholic; and the literary glory of Germany depends upon these institutions.”54

  Educational reform was in the air. Johann Basedow, inspired by reading Rousseau, issued in 1774 a four-volume Elementarwerke, which outlined a plan for teaching children through direct acquaintance with nature. They were to acquire health and vigor through games and physical exercises; they were to receive much of their instruction outdoors instead of being tied to desks; they were to learn languages not through grammar and rote but through naming objects and actions encountered in the day’s experience; they were to learn morals by forming and regulating their own social groups; and they were to prepare for life by learning a trade. Religion was to enter into the curriculum, but not as pervasively as before; Basedow openly doubted the Trinity.55 He established at Dessau (1774) a sample Philan-thropinum, which produced pupils whose “sauciness and pertness, omniscience and arrogance”56 scandalized their elders; but this “progressive education” harmonized with the Enlightenment, and spread rapidly throughout Germany.

  Experiments in education were part of the intellectual ferment that agitated the country between the Seven Years’ War and the French Revolution. Books, newspapers, magazines, circulating libraries, reading clubs, multiplied enthusiastically. A dozen literary movements sprouted, each with its ideology, journal, and protagonists. The first German daily, Die Leipziger Zeitung, had begun in 1660; by 1784 there were 217 daily or weekly newspapers in Germany. In 1751 Lessing began to edit the literary section of the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin; in 1772 Merck, Goethe, and Herder issued Die Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen, or Frankfurt Literary News; in 1773-89 Wieland made Der teutsche Merkur the most influential literary review in Germany. There were three thousand German authors in 1773, six thousand in 1787; Leipzig alone had 133. Many of these were part-time writers; Lessing was probably the first German who, through many years, made a living by literature. Almost all authors were poor, for copyright protected them only in their own principality; pirated editions severely limited the earnings of author and publisher alike. Goethe lost money on Götz von Berlichingen, and made little on Werther, the greatest literary success of
that generation.

  The outburst of German literature is among the major events of the second half of the eighteenth century. D’Alembert, writing from Potsdam in 1763, found nothing worthy of report in German publications;57 by 1790 Germany rivaled, perhaps surpassed, France in contemporary literary genius. We have noted Frederick’s scorn of the German language as raucous and coarse and poisoned with consonants; yet Frederick himself, by his dramatic repulse of so many enemies, inspired Germany with a national pride that encouraged German writers to use their own language and stand up before the Voltaires and the Rousseaus. By 1763 German had refined itself into a literary language, and was ready to voice the German Enlightenment.

  This Aufklärung was no virgin birth. It was the painful product of English deism coupled with French free thought on the ground prepared by the moderate rationalism of Christian von Wolff. The major deistic blasts of Toland, Tindal, Collins, Whiston, and Woolston had by 1743 been translated into German, and by 1755 Grimm’s Correspondance was disseminating the latest French ideas among the German elite. Already in 1756 there were enough freethinkers in Germany to allow the publication of a Freidenker-lexikon. In 1763-64 Basedow issued his Philalethie (Love of Truth), which rejected any divine revelation other than that of nature itself. In 1759 Christoph Friedrich Nikolai, a Berlin bookseller, began Briefe die neueste Literatur betreffend; enriched with articles by Lessing, Herder, and Moses Mendelssohn, these Letters concerning the Latest Literature continued till 1765 to be a literary beacon of the Aufklärung, warring against extravagance in literature and authority in religion.

  Freemasonry shared in the movement. The first lodge of Freimaurer was founded at Hamburg in 1733; other lodges followed; members included Frederick the Great, Dukes Ferdinand of Brunswick and Karl August of Saxe-Weimar, Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Klopstock, Goethe, Kleist. Generally these groups favored deism, but avoided open criticism of orthodox belief. In 1776 Adam Weishaupt, professor of canon law at Ingolstadt, organized a kindred secret society, which he called Perfektibilisten, but which later took on the old name of Illuminati. Its ex-Jesuit founder, following the model of the Society of Jesus, divided its associates into grades of initiation, and pledged them to obey their leaders in a campaign to “unite all men capable of independent thought,” make man “a masterpiece of reason, and thus attain the highest perfection in the art of government.”58 In 1784 Karl Theodor, elector of Bavaria, outlawed all secret societies, and the Order of the Illuminati suffered an early death.