The General Directory was still in many respects quite different from a modern ministerial bureaucracy: business was not primarily organized according to spheres of activity, but, as in most executive governmental organs in Europe at this time, by a mixed system in which provincial portfolios were supplemented with responsibility for specific policy areas. Department II of the General Directory, for example, dealt with the Kurmark, Magdeburg and the provisioning and quartering of troops; Department III combined responsibility for Kleve, Mark and various other exclaves with management of the salt monopoly and the postal services. Moreover, the lines of demarcation separating distinct spheres of competence within the new organization remained unclear, so that serious internal conflicts over jurisdiction continued well into the 1730s – the institutional rivalries that had given rise to the General Directory in the first place were thus internalized rather than resolved, and they were cross-cut with new structural tensions between locality, province and central government.34
On the other hand, the conditions of employment and the general ethos of the General Directory do sound a familiar note from a present-day perspective. The ministers were expected to convene at seven in the morning in summer and eight in winter. They were expected to remain at their desks until the day’s work was accounted for. They were required to come into the office on Saturdays in order to check the week’s accounts. If they spent more than a certain number of hours at work on any particular day, a warm meal was to be provided at the expense of the administration, but served in two sittings, so that half the ministers could keep working while their colleagues ate. These were the beginnings of that world of supervision, regulation and routine that is common to all modern bureaucracies. By comparison with ministerial posts in the era of the Great Elector and Frederick I, service in the General Directory offered fewer opportunities for illicit self-enrichment: a system of concealed supervision and reporting that ran through every tier of the organization ensured – in theory at least – that irregularities were immediately notified to the king. Serious offences met with punishments ranging from dismissal to fines and restitutions, to exemplary execution at the place of work. A notorious case was that of the East Prussian War and Domains Councillor von Schlubhut, who was hanged for embezzlement before the main meeting room of the Königsberg Chamber.
*
After the disaster of 1709–10, Frederick William was especially concerned for the condition of East Prussia. His father’s administration had already succeeded in occupying some of the vacated farms with foreign settlers and migrants from the other Hohenzollern provinces. In 1715, Frederick William appointed a nobleman from one of the leading families of the province, Karl Heinrich Truchsess von Waldburg, to oversee reforms to the provincial administration. Waldburg focused above all on the iniquities of the existing tax system, which tended to operate to the disadvantage of the smallholding peasants. Under the traditional arrangements in the province, every landowner paid a flat rate of tax for every Hufe of land in his possession (the Hufe was one of the basic contemporary units of land; the English equivalent was ‘hide’). But since the tax-collecting agencies of the administration were still largely in the hands of the corporate nobility, the authorities tended to turn a blind eye when noble landowners understated their taxable landholdings. The returns of peasant households, by contrast, were subjected to the most pedantic scrutiny, so that not a single hide was missed. Further iniquities arose from the fact that no account was taken of the quality and yield of the land in question, so that smallholders, who tended in general to occupy the less fertile land, were subject to proportionally greater burdens than the major landowners. The problem, in Frederick William’s eyes, was not the fact of inequality as such, which was accepted as inherent in all social order, but the depression of revenues that resulted from the operation of this particular system. Underlying his concern was the presumption, which the king shared with some of the best-known German and Austrian economic theorists of the era, that excessive taxation reduced productivity and that the ‘conservation’ of his subjects was one of the foremost tasks of the sovereign.35 The king’s concern for peasant households in particular represented a shift from the previous generation of mercantilist theory and practice (embodied in the career of Louis XIV’s minister of finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert), which had tended to focus on the stimulation of commerce and manufacturing at the expense of agrarian producers.
The East Prussian reform programme began with the compilation of a survey of landholdings. The process revealed some 35,000 hides of previously undeclared taxable land, amounting to an area of nearly 6,000 square kilometres. In order to correct for variations in yield, the provincial domains administration then drew up a comprehensive classification of all holdings according to soil quality. Once these measures were in place, a new General Hide Tax, calibrated for soil quality, was imposed on the entire province. In conjunction with new, more transparent and standardized leasing arrangements for farms on crown land, Waldburg’s East Prussian reforms produced a dramatic rise in agrarian productivity and crown revenues.36
While arrangements for the General Hide Tax were still being put in place, Frederick William launched the long and difficult process known as the ‘allodification of the fiefs’ (Allodifikation der Lehen). The term referred to removing various bits of legal red tape left over from the feudal era, when noblemen had ‘held’ their lands as ‘vassals’ of the monarch and the sale and transfer of property were encumbered by the need to acknowledge residual claims vested in the heirs and descendants of previous owners. The sale of a noble estate was henceforth final, a state of affairs that provided new incentives for investment and agricultural improvement. In return for the reclassification of their land as ‘allodial’ (i.e. independently owned and unbound by any feudal obligations), the nobilities were to accept a permanent tax. The measure was legally complex, because the legacy of feudal law and custom was different in every province. It was also very unpopular, because the attachment of the nobilities to their traditional tax-exempt status was far greater than their resentment of their now largely obsolete and theoretical feudal obligations. They saw ‘allodification’ – not without justification – as a cunning pretext for undermining their ancient fiscal privileges. In many provinces, years of negotiation were required before the new tax could be introduced; in Kleve and Mark no agreement was reached and the tax had to be extracted through ‘forced execution’. Opposition was also strong in the recently acquired and still independently minded Duchy of Magdeburg; in 1718 and 1725, delegations of noblemen from this province were successful in securing judgements supporting their case from the imperial court in Vienna.37
These fiscal initiatives were flanked by numerous other revenue-raising measures. The marshes of the Havelland, where the Swedish army had floundered in 1675, were drained so energetically that 15,000 hectares of excellent arable and pasture were won back within ten years. Work began on the draining of the delta region around the rivers Oder, Warthe and Netze, an epic project that would be completed only during the next reign, when the Oder River Commission established by Frederick William’s successor oversaw the reclamation of some 500 square kilometres of marshland from the Oder floodplains. Reflecting the fashionable contemporary concern with population size as the chief index of prosperity, Frederick William launched settlement programmes to raise productivity and stimulate manufacturing in particular regions. Protestant immigrants from Salzburg, for example, were settled on farms in the far east of East Prussia, and Huguenot textile manufacturers were installed in the city of Halle in the hope of mounting a challenge to the dominance of Saxon imports in the Hohenzollern Duchy of Magdeburg.38 A series of regulations issued in the 1720s and 1730s dismantled many of the localized guild powers and privileges to create a more unified labour market in the manufacturing sector.39
One area of particularly sustained government activity was the grain economy. Grain was the most fundamental of all products – it accounted for the lio
n’s share of economic transactions and for the greater part of what most people bought and consumed in their daily lives. The king’s policy on grain was based on two objectives. The first was to protect Brandenburg-Prussia’s grain growers and traders from foreign imports – the main concern here was the grain produced on Polish estates, which was of excellent quality and less expensive.40 The means adopted to achieve this were high tariffs and the prevention of smuggling. How successful the authorities were in stemming the flow of illegal grain is difficult to say. The records indicate numerous prosecutions, some of small dealers, such as groups of Polish peasants attempting to pass as subjects of the Mark and carrying a few bushels of contraband grain, as well as of more sophisticated operators, like the team of Mecklenburg smugglers who tried to sneak thirteen wagonloads of grain into the Uckermark in 1740.41
In order to prevent poor harvests from driving grain prices up to the point where they undermined the viability of the urban manufacturing and commercial economies, Frederick William also expanded the network of grain magazines that the Great Elector had used to provision his standing army. These magazines had been retained during the reign of Frederick I, but they were poorly managed and far too small to cope with the needs of the civilian economy, as the disaster of 1709–10 revealed. Starting in the early 1720s, Frederick William set about establishing a system of large dual-purpose magazines (twenty-one in all) that would serve the needs of his army but also perform an important role in stabilizing the domestic grain market. The provincial commissariats and chambers were instructed to hold the price of grain as steady as possible, by purchasing stocks when prices were low and selling them off in times of dearth. The new system was to prove its worth in 1734–7 and again in 1739, when the social and economic impact of a succession of poor harvests was buffered by the sale of low-priced government grain. One of the last orders issued by the king was an instruction to the General Directory dated 31 May 1740, the day of his death, stipulating that the grain magazines of Berlin, Wesel, Stettin and Minden were to be filled again before the onset of the coming winter.42
There were, of course, limits to Frederick William’s economic achievement and blind spots in his vision. He shared the widespread contemporary mercantilist preference for regulation and control. There is a clear contrast with the more trade-oriented policies of the Great Elector, who had acquired the colony of Gross Friedrichsburg on the west coast of Africa in the hope that this would open the door to an expansion of colonial commerce. Frederick I had kept up the ailing colony for sentimental reasons, but Frederick William sold it off to the Dutch in 1721, saying he had ‘always regarded this trading nonsense as a chimera’.43 On the domestic front there was a similar disregard for the importance of exchange and infrastructure. Frederick William never seriously tackled the problem of market integration within his territories. Work on the construction of a canal between the Oder and the Elbe accelerated during his reign, a more uniform system of grain measurement was introduced, and there was some reduction – against local protests – of internal tolls. Yet numerous obstacles remained to hinder the movement of goods across the Hohenzollern lands. Even within Brandenburg, tolls continued to be levied on the inner provincial borders. Little effort was made to integrate the outlying territories to the east and west, which were treated in economic terms as if they were foreign principalities. Brandenburg-Prussia was still worlds away from constituting an integrated domestic market when the king died in 1740.44
Under Frederick William, the confrontation between an increasingly confident monarchy and the holders of traditional power entered its administrative phase. By contrast with his predecessors, Frederick William refused at the time of his accession to sign the traditional ‘concessions’ to the provincial nobilities. There were no theatrical set-tos in the diets (which in any case became much rarer in most areas during his reign). Instead the traditional privileges of the nobilities were whittled away by successive incremental measures. The time-honoured tax immunities of the landed nobility were curtailed, as we have seen; organs that had previously answered to local interests were gradually subordinated to the authority of the central administration; the freedom of noblemen to travel for leisure or study was cut back so that the provincial elites in Brandenburg-Prussia were slowly detached from the cosmopolitan networks of the Holy Roman Empire.
This was not merely a by-product of the process of centralization; the king was quite explicit about the need to diminish the standing of the nobility and clearly saw himself as furthering the historical project inaugurated by his grandfather, the Great Elector. ‘As far as the nobility is concerned,’ he once remarked in relation to East Prussia, ‘it previously had great privileges, which the Elector Frederick William broke through his sovereignty, and I have now brought them entirely into subordination [Gehorsahm ] through the General Hide Tax of 1715.’45 The central administration he built up to achieve his objectives was deliberately stocked with commoners (who were generally ennobled for their services), so that there would never be any question of corporate solidarity with the noble interest.46 Yet, oddly enough, Frederick William always succeeded in finding talented noblemen – like Truchsess von Waldburg – willing to assist him in implementing his policies, even at the cost of their corporate comrades. The motivations behind such collaboration are not always clear; some were simply won over to the monarch’s administrative vision, others may have been motivated by disaffection with the corporate provincial milieu, or joined the administration because they needed the salary. The provincial nobilities were far from monolithic; factional and family rivalries were common and local interest conflicts often overrode more general concerns. Recognizing this, Frederick William avoided categorical judgements. ‘You must be obliging and gracious with the entire nobility from all provinces,’ he advised his successor in the Instruction of 1722, ‘and give preference to the good ones over the bad and reward the loyal ones.’47
THE ARMY
Your Excellency will already know [… ] of the Resolution the new King has taken of increasing his army to 50,000 men. [… ] When the state of war [i.e. military budget] was laid before him, he writt in the margen these words, I will augment my Forces to the number of 50,000 men which ought not to allarme any person whatsoever, since my only pleasure is my Army.48
When Frederick William came to the throne, the Prussian army numbered 40,000 men. By 1740, when he died, it had increased in size to over 80,000, so that Brandenburg-Prussia boasted a military establishment that seemed to contemporaries quite out of proportion to its population and economic capabilities. The king justified the immense costs involved by arguing that only a well-trained and independently financed fighting force would provide him with the autonomy in international affairs that had been denied to his father and grandfather.
Yet there is also a sense in which the army was an end in itself, an intuition reinforced by the fact that Frederick William remained reluctant throughout his reign to deploy his army in support of any foreign-political objective. Frederick William was powerfully attracted to the orderliness of the military; he himself regularly wore the uniform of a Prussian lieutenant or captain from the mid-1720s onward and he could conceive of nothing more pleasing to the eye than the sight of uniformed men moving in ever changing symmetries across a parade square (indeed he flattened a number of royal pleasure gardens in order to convert them for this purpose and tried where possible to work in rooms from which drilling exercises could be viewed). One of the few indulgences in wasteful ostentation he allowed himself was the creation of a regiment of exceptionally tall soldiers (affectionately known as ‘lange Kerls’ or ‘tall lads’) at Potsdam. Immense sums were squandered on the recruitment from all over Europe of these abnormally tall men, some of whom were partially disabled by their condition and thus physically unfit for real military service. Their likenesses were memorialized in individual full-length oil portraits commissioned by the king; executed in a primitive realist style, they show towering men with hands l
ike dinner plates plinthed on black leather shoes the size of plough shares. The army was, of course, an instrument of policy, but it was also the human and institutional expression of this monarch’s view of the world. As an orderly, hierarchical, masculine system in which individual interests and identities were subordinated to those of the collective, the king’s authority was unchallenged, and differences in rank were functional rather than corporate or decorative, it came close to actualizing his vision of an ideal society.
9. Portrait of Grenadier James Kirkland, soldier in the Royal Guard of King Frederick William I, painted by Johann Christof Merk, c. 1714
Frederick William’s interest in military reform predated his accession to the throne. We see it in a set of guidelines that the nineteen-year-old crown prince proposed to the Council of War in 1707. The calibres of all infantry guns should be the same, he argued, so that standard-issue shot could be used for all types; all units should employ the same design of bayonet; the men in each regiment should wear identical daggers on a model to be determined by the commanding officer; even the cartridge pouches were to be furnished according to a single design, with identical straps.49 One of his important early innovations as a military commander was the introduction within his own regiment of a new and more rigorous form of parade drill intended to heighten the manoeuvrability of unwieldy masses of troops across difficult terrain and to ensure that firepower could be delivered consistently and to the greatest effect. After 1709, when Frederick William witnessed Prussian troops in action at the Battle of Malplaquet during the War of the Spanish Succession, the new drill was gradually extended through the Brandenburg-Prussian forces as a whole.50
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