by Will Durant
IV. SAXONY
East of Westphalia and south of Prussia was a German state, known to its citizens as Sachsen, to the French as Saxe, which once had ranged from Bohemia to the Baltic, had left its name on various -sexes in Britain, had lately been devastated by the Seven Years’ War, but was now content to be a prosperous electorate spreading to right and left of the Elbe from Luther’s Wittenberg to Dresden, the Paris of Germany.
Under the long rule of Frederick Augustus III as elector (1768–1806) and as King Frederick Augustus I (1806–27), the country, blessed by the Elbe as its nourishing mother, soon recovered its prosperity. Dresden again rejoiced in its rococo architecture, its spacious thoroughfares and handsome bridges, its Sistine Madonna and Meissen pottery. The young ruler, though never outstanding as a statesman, managed his realm judiciously, spent his revenues carefully, paid off the national debt, and developed at Freiberg a famous School of Mines. Dresden’s rival, Leipzig, resumed its annual book fair, where publishers from everywhere in Europe offered their latest wares, and Germany’s flourishing literature led the intellectual parade.
Frederick Augustus “the Just” joined Prussia and Austria in an attempt to discipline the French Revolution, and shared in the setback at Valmy in 1792. He was badly upset by the execution of his cousin Louis XVI, but he willingly joined in making peace with France in 1795. When Napoleon rose to power, Frederick kept on good terms with him, and Napoleon respected him as an enlightened despot loved by his people. However, when Napoleon’s army, in 1806, was approaching Jena, Frederick was caught between hammer and anvil: Napoleon warned him not to let Prussian troops pass through Saxony; Prussia insisted, and invaded; the Elector yielded, and let his little army join the Prussians. Napoleon, victorious, treated Frederick Augustus with comparative lenience: exacted an indemnity of 25 million francs, bade him change his title to king of Saxony, made him head of the grand duchy of Warsaw, and compelled Prussia to cede to Saxony the “Circle of Cottbus” on the west bank of the River Spree. Prussia was thus hemmed in between Poland on the north and east, Westphalia on the west, and Saxony on the south—all pledged to Napoleon. It seemed only a matter of time before Prussia would have to follow the rest of Germany in vassalage to Bonaparte’s France.
V. PRUSSIA: FREDERICK’S LEGACY, 1786–87
At the death of Frederick II the Great the kingdom of Prussia consisted of the electorate of Brandenburg; the duchies of Silesia and Farther Pomerania; the provinces of East Prussia—with Konigsberg, Friedland, and Memel—and West Prussia, taken from Poland in 1772; and divers enclaves in western Germany, including East Friesland, Münster, and Essen. After Frederick’s death Prussia added the region of Thorn and Danzig in the Second Partition of Poland (1792); Warsaw and the heart of Poland in the Third Partition (1795); Ansbach, Bayreuth, and Mansfeld in 1791; Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, in 1797. Prussia seemed resolved to absorb all northern Germany when Napoleon relieved her of the task.
The man who had made possible this expansion of Prussian power was the father of Frederick the Great. Frederick William I, besides disciplining his son and his people to bear suffering silently, had left him the best army in Christendom, and a nation tightly organized with universal education, universal taxation, and universal military service; Prussia had become a morsel fit for a martial king. All Europe, all Germany, all Prussia trembled at the sight of this man-eating monarch, with his domineering Junker officers, his six-foot grenadiers. “Don’t get tall,” a mother cautioned her son, “or the recruiters will get you.”8
To that army and state Frederick the Great (r. 1740–86) added a personal genius sharpened by Voltaire, and a stoicism rooted in his genes. He raised Prussia from a small kingdom rivaled by Saxony and Bavaria to a power equal to Austria in the German world, and standing as the strongest barrier to the persistent pressure of the fertile Slavs to reach again their old frontier on the Elbe. Internally he built a judiciary famous for its integrity, and a corps of administrators which gradually replaced the nobility as the officialdom of the state. He established freedom of speech, press, and worship, and under his protection “the German school system superseded the profound spiritual slumber of priestly education.”9 He was the one man of his time who could outwit Voltaire and teach Napoleon. “The great Frederick,” said Napoleon in 1797, “is the hero whom I love to consult in everything, in war and in administration; I have studied his principles in the midst of camps, and his familiar letters are for me lessons of philosophy.”10
There were some gaps in his achievement. He found no time, in his campaigns, to bring Prussian feudalism to the more humane level which it had reached in the Rhineland states; and his wars had left his people in a condition of poverty and exhaustion that were partly responsible for the decline of Prussia after his death. Frederick William II (r. 1786–97), reversing the tastes of his childless uncle, was fonder of women and art than of government and war. He supplemented his first wife with a mistress, who bore him five children; he divorced his wife in 1769, and married Friederike Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt, who bore him seven children; and during this marriage he persuaded his court preachers to let him contract morganatic unions with Julie von Voss (1787), who died two years later, and then Countess Sophie Dönhoff (1790), who bore him a son. He found time to play the violoncello, to welcome visits by Mozart and Beethoven, to establish a music academy and a national theater. He financed and promulgated (1794) a new law code containing many liberal elements. Taking a religious turn, he allowed his favorite, the reformed rationalist11 Johann von Wöllner, to issue (1788) a Religionsedikt ending religious toleration, and establishing a censorship that drove many writers from Berlin.
His foreign policy admits of defense. He refused to continue the aggressive stance of his predecessor; flouting a century of precedents, he sought friendship with Austria as a major step toward German unity and security. He did not like the French Revolution, being content with monarchy (so was his people), and he sent some troops to join in the defeat at Valmy (1792); but he was glad to bring their survivors home to help him in the Second Partition of Poland. In 1795 he signed the Peace of Basel with France, which left him free to take Warsaw in the Third Partition.
Despite his acquisitions, he had allowed his country to decline in wealth and power. As early as 1789, Mirabeau, after a long stay in Berlin, wrote prophetically: “The Prussian monarchy is so constituted that it could not cope with any calamity.”12 The Army grew lax in discipline and insolent with pride; the bureaucracy had softened into corruption and intrigue; the finances of the state were in disorder and near insolvency.13 “Only the incisive demonstration of war could display to this blinded generation the inward decay which… paralyzed all activity by the magic of ancient renown.”14
VI. THE COLLAPSE OF PRUSSIA: 1797–1807
So the amorous King died, and the care of the ailing state fell to his son Frederick William III, who carried the burden through Napoleon and Metternich till 1840. Everyone wondered how he could last so long, being weak in will and benign in sentiment. He had all the virtues which a good citizen is instructed to develop or profess: cooperation, justice, kindness, modesty, marital fidelity, and a love of peace. He freed the serfs on the royal domain. In 1793 he married Luise (Louise) of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, seventeen, beautiful, passionately patriotic, and soon the idol of the nation; she remained chief source of the happiness into which he seemed to invite every calamity.
The new century brought him one crisis after another. In 1803 the French seized Hanover, whose neutrality had been guaranteed by Prussia; the young officers in the Prussian Army clamored for at least a breach, if not war, with France; Frederick William held his peace. French forces closed the mouths of the Weser and the Elbe, hurting Prussian trade; Frederick counseled patience. Queen Louise pleaded for war; dressed in the uniform of the regiment that bore her name, she paraded on horseback, and breathed fire into the undefeated Army; Prince Louis Ferdinand, cousin to the King, longed for a chance to show his mettle; the aging Duk
e of Brunswick offered to lead the Prussian Army; General Blücher, hero-to-be at Waterloo, supported him; Frederick William withstood them quietly. In 1805 Austria, challenging Napoleon, sought Prussian aid; the King was not ready.
But when the French, en route to Austerlitz, marched through Prussian Bayreuth, Frederick William’s patience ran out. He invited Alexander of Russia to a conference at Potsdam; there they took oath, at the tomb of Frederick the Great, to stand together against Napoleon, and go to the aid of Austria. Alexander’s troops marched south and suffered defeat. By the time Prussia’s army was mobilized the battle was over, and Alexander was in flight to Russia. Napoleon gave Frederick William a lenient but compromising peace (December 15, 1805; February 15, 1806): Prussia was to cede Neuchâtel, Cleves, and Ansbach to France, and was to receive Hanover in return. Eager for this long-coveted prize, Frederick William agreed to close all Prussian ports to British goods, and signed a defensive-offensive alliance with France. England declared war upon Prussia.
Napoleon, challenging Nemesis, proceeded to form the Confederation of the Rhine, which surrounded some Prussian provinces in western Germany. Hearing that Napoleon was secretly offering Hanover to England, Frederick William entered into a secret alliance with Russia (July, 1806) for defense against France. On August 1 Napoleon took all western Germany under his protectorate. On August 9 Frederick William mobilized part of his army; on September 4 he reopened Prussian ports to British goods; on September 13 he ordered his troops to enter Saxony. Joined by the Saxon forces, his generals, under the Duke of Brunswick, commanded 200,000 men. Furious at what he considered the violation of two treaties and an alliance, Napoleon ordered his armies, already stationed in Germany, to converge upon the front and flank of the allies. He himself hurried to the front and supervised the annihilation of the Prussians and the Saxons at Jena and Auerstedt on the same day, October 14, 1806.
That story has been told from the view of France. From Prussia’s side it was one of the darkest tragedies in her history. Frederick William, with his government and family, fled to East Prussia, and tried to govern from Memel. Napoleon, from the King’s chambers in Berlin, issued orders to a continent, and proclaimed the Continental Blockade. His troops drove the Prussians out of Poland, defeated the Russians at Friedland, and escorted Napoleon to Tilsit, where he made peace with Alexander. There Frederick William learned the final terms on which Prussia would be allowed to exist. It must cede to France all Prussian lands west of the Elbe, and must return to Poland all of Prussia’s pilferings in the three partitions. It must accept and pay for the occupation of Prussia by French soldiers until it should have completed payment of 160 million francs as a war indemnity. By this treaty, signed on July 9, 1807, Prussia lost forty-nine percent of her former terrain, and 5,250,000 of her former 9,750,000 population. In the years 1806–08 the cost of the occupation forces and the payments on the indemnity took up the entire revenue of Prussia.15 There were some Germans who, looking at the ruined state, predicted that it would never again play an important role in German history.
VII. PRUSSIA REBORN: 1807–12
There is a tough kernel in the German character—firmed by centuries of arduous survival between alien and martial peoples—that can bear defeat proudly and bide its time for response. And there were then men like Stein and Hardenberg, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, who never let a day pass without thinking how Prussia could be redeemed. Those million serfs, hopeless under ancient thralls—what energy might they pour into the Prussian economy if they were released from humiliating burdens and were welcomed into free enterprise on the soil or in the towns? And those towns, now listless under commerce-scorning nobles governing the nation from a central distant capital—what invigorating initiatives might they develop, in industry, business, and finance, under the stimulus and experiments of freedom? Revolutionary France had freed its serfs and prospered, but it had kept the towns under the political tutelage of Paris; why not steal a march on the conqueror and free the towns as well as the serfs?
So thought Freiherr Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, “of and at the Rock,” the ancestral town of his family on the River Lahn, which flowed into the Rhine above Coblenz. He was not a baron but a Freiherr, a freeman, belonging to the Reichsrittershaft, or Imperial Knighthood, pledged to defend his domain and the realm. He was born (October 26, 1757) not “of and at the Rock,” but in nearby Nassau, son of a chamberlain to the Elector of Mainz. At sixteen he entered the school of law and politics in the University of Gottingen. There he read Montesquieu, followed him in admiring the British Constitution, and resolved to be great. He served his legal apprenticeship in the law courts of the Holy Roman Empire at Wetzlar and at the Imperial Diet in Regensburg.
In 1780 he entered the Prussian civil service, and worked in the administration of Westphalian manufactures and mines. By 1796 he had won a prominent position in the economic administration of all Prussian provinces along the Rhine. His capacity for work, and the success of his proposals, brought him a call to Berlin in 1804 to serve as minister of state for trade. Within a month he was commissioned to help in the Ministry of Finance. When news reached the capital that Napoleon had shattered the Prussian Army at Jena, Stein succeeded in removing to Memel the contents of the Prussian Treasury; with these funds Frederick William III was able to finance his government in exile. Perhaps the excitement and disasters of war sharpened the temper of the King and his ministers; on January 3, 1807, Frederick William III dismissed Stein as “a refractory, insolent, obstinate, and disobedient official, who, proud of his genius and his talents,… acts from passion and from personal hatred and rancor.”16 Stein returned to his home in Nassau. Six months later, having heard Napoleon recommend Stein as an administrator, the King offered Stein the Ministry of Home Affairs.
It was precisely the post from which the irascible Freiherr could best advance reforms fit to release the energies of the Prussian people. By October 4, 1807, he was at his new post; by October 9 he had prepared for the King the proclamation which millions of peasants and hundreds of Prussian liberals had long pleaded for. Article I was apparently modest, declaring the right of “every inhabitant of our States” to buy and own land; but this right had hitherto been refused to peasants. Article II allowed any Prussian to engage in any lawful industry or business; so, as under Napoleon, career was open to talent of whatever pedigree, and class barriers were removed from the economy. Article X forbade any further enserfdom; and Article XII declared that “from Martinmas ceases all villeinage in Our entire States…. There shall be only free persons.”17 Many nobles resisted the edict, and it was not fully enforced till 1811.
Stein and his liberal associates labored through the year 1808 to free the towns of Prussia from rule by feudal barons, or retired army officers, or tax commissioners with almost limitless powers. On November 19, 1808, the King, again a willing reformer, issued a “Municipal Ordinance” by which the towns were to be governed by a local assembly choosing its own officials; except that in large towns the burgomaster was to be appointed by the king from three men chosen by the assembly. So began the healthy local political life that grew into the outstanding excellence of Germany’s municipal administration.
Stein was not alone in remaking Prussia. Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755–1813), Count August Neithardt von Gneisenau (1760–1831), and Prince Karl von Hardenberg (1750–1822) labored together to rebuild a Prussian Army, using various devices to evade Napoleon’s restrictions. The progress of this operation was such that Stein, on August 15, 1808, wrote to a Prussian officer a letter which fell into French hands and was printed in the Moniteur for September 8. Part of it said:
Exasperation grows every day in Germany; we must feed it and work upon people. I very much wish that we could make connections with Hesse and Westphalia, and that we should prepare ourselves for certain events; that we should seek to maintain relations with men of energy and good will, and that we could put such people in contact with others…. The affairs of Spain l
eave a lively impression; they prove what we long since should have suspected. It would be useful to spread these tidings prudently. We think here that war between France and Austria is inevitable. This conflict will decide the fate of Europe.18
Napoleon, about to leave for a major campaign in Spain, ordered Frederick William to dismiss Stein. The King, still at Memel, delayed compliance, until he was warned that the French would continue their occupation of Prussian territory until he obeyed. On November 24, 1808, Stein was again dismissed; and on December 16 Napoleon, from Madrid, issued a decree outlawing him, confiscating all his goods, and ordering his arrest wherever found in French-controlled territory. Stein escaped into Bohemia.
His loss to Prussia was made up by the appointment (1810) of Hardenberg as state chancellor—in effect prime minister. He had been part of the government before, had reorganized the Ministry of Finance, had negotiated the peace of 1795, had shared responsibility for the disaster of 1806, and had been dismissed at the insistence of Napoleon (1807). Now, at the age of sixty, while Napoleon was amiably absorbed with his new Empress, Hardenberg moved the King toward constitutional monarchy by persuading him to summon first an Assembly of Notables (1811), and then (1812) a Representative Assembly of the Nation with consultative powers, as a check and prod on the king. An admirer of the French philosophes, Hardenberg secularized church property, insisted on civic equality for the Jews (March 11, 1812), levied a property tax on nobles and a profit tax on businessmen, ended the obstructive monopolies of the guilds, and established freedom of enterprise and trade.
