Yet they had enough in common to make fruitful collaboration possible. Both were acutely aware of the power and importance of public opinion – in this sense, they both carried the stamp of the European enlightenment. Both believed passionately in the need for structural reform at the level of the supreme executive – they had coordinated their positions on this issue during the bitter factional strife of 1806. Moreover, they were not alone: during their swift rise through the Prussian administration over more than two decades, a substantial network of younger men had coalesced around them. Some were protégésor friends, some had cut their teeth as officials in the Franconian or Westphalian administrations, and some were simply likeminded colleagues who gravitated towards the reformers as crisis loomed.
The first and in some ways the most urgent task facing the reformers was the re-establishment of Prussia as a power capable of functioning autonomously on the European stage. In addressing this problem, the reformers focused on two areas: the central decision-making executive and the military. As we have seen, there was widespread agreement among senior officials that Prussia required a more streamlined ministerial structure. A particular concern was the so-called ‘cabinet system’, in which one or more ‘foreign ministers’ competed with cabinet secretaries close to the monarch and other favoured advisers for influence over the policy-making process. This, it was claimed, was the cause of the malaise that had brought Prussia to the predicament of 1806. After his appointment in October 1807, therefore, Stein went to great pains to persuade the king to dissolve his cabinet of personal advisers, and to establish (in November 1808) a central executive consisting of five functionally defined ministries, each run by a responsible minister with direct access to the king. Taken in combination, these two measures would prevent the duplication of advisory functions between secretaries and ministers, and the appointment of multiple ‘foreign ministers’ in tandem. They would also force the king – in theory – to channel his official consultations through one responsible official, and prevent him from playing rival ministers and advisers off against each other.
Stein, Hardenberg and their collaborators naturally argued that these measures were essential if Prussia were to be restored to a condition where it could reverse the verdict of 1807. They based this claim on the presumption that the disaster of 1806–7 had been caused by the adversarial tensions within the executive, that it could have been avoided with a better decision-making structure capable of steering the monarch into the required decisions. Underlying these arguments was what Carl Schmitt once called a ‘cult of the decision’: everything depended upon devising a system that was supple and transparent enough to deliver swift, rational and well-informed decisions in response to changing conditions. It was difficult to counter this argument in the emotionally charged environment of post-Tilsit Prussia.
Yet the case for the reformers’‘decisionism’ was less compelling than it seemed. After all, the problem for Prussian foreign policy in the years 1804–6 lay not in the fact that the king had insisted on canvassing a wide range of views, but in the intrinsic difficulty of the situations Prussia had faced. It is too easy to forget that there had never been a figure like Napoleon – the efforts at ‘reunion’ launched by Louis XIV on the periphery of the Holy Roman Empire during the reign of the Great Elector look pale beside the scale and ambition of Bonaparte’s imperial project. There were no rules for dealing with an antagonist of this type, and no precedent by which to predict how he would act next. As the rug was pulled from under the neutrality policy, it was exceptionally difficult to judge which way Prussia should jump, the more so as the international balance of power and the incoming signals from potential alliance partners were constantly shifting. The Great Elector had spent long periods of agonized wavering between options during the Northern War and the various French wars of Louis XIV, not because he was by nature indecisive or fearful, or because he lacked an adequately streamlined executive, but because the predicaments he faced demanded careful weighing up and were not susceptible to obvious solutions. Yet the judgements Frederick William III was called upon to make were finer, involved more variables, and were freighted with greater risks. There is no reason to suppose that the system advocated by the reformers, had it been implemented, say, in 1804, would have generated better outcomes than the cabinet system they so fiercely attacked – after all, the king’s ill-fated decision to go to war was supported at the time by those who opposed the old system.20
If the reformers nevertheless pressed for executive streamlining in the sphere of foreign policy, this was in part because the concentration of the executive was guaranteed to consolidate the power of the most senior officials. In place of the jockeying for influence that had gone on within the antechamber of power before 1806, the new system promised the five ministers a stable place at the policy-making table. Under the old system, the influence of an individual adviser waxed and waned unpredictably as the king’s ear turned in different directions. One day’s careful work of argument and persuasion could be wiped out on the next. Under the new arrangements, however, it would be possible to work with the other ministers to manage the king, and it is interesting, though hardly surprising, to note that nearly every senior official who called for executive streamlining during the period 1805–8 envisaged that one of the key offices would fall to himself.21
The reformers always stressed – it would have been extremely impolitic not to – that their objective was to sharpen the focus and reach of the monarch’s authority by placing him in control of a better decision-making tool. In reality they were limiting his freedom of movement by confronting him with a closed bench of advisers. They aimed to bureaucratize the monarchy, embedding it in the state’s broader structures of responsibility and accountability.22 The king saw this clearly enough, and therefore baulked when Stein proposed that in future decrees issued by the king should be valid only if they bore the signatures of the five ministers.23
The Prussian army was understandably the focus of intense interest after Jena and Auerstedt, but debate over military reform was nothing new. Within a few years of the death of Frederick the Great, there had been voices, civilian and military, calling for a critical re-examination of the Frederician system. The debate continued after 1800, as the more receptive military intellectuals absorbed the lessons of the revolutionary and early Napoleonic campaigns. The adjutant and military theorist Colonel Christian von Massenbach, a south German who had entered Prussian service in 1782 (at the age of twenty-four), and was close to Frederick William III, argued that the new practice of ‘big war’ exemplified by Napoleon’s campaigns necessitated the professionalization of military planning and leadership. The fate of Prussia should not depend on whether the monarch himself was a gifted strategist. Enduring structures should be set in place to assure that all the available information was collated and weighed up before and during any campaign. Command functions should be concentrated in one decision-making organ.24 There are clear parallels between these early sketches of a modern general staff system and the contemporaneous debate over executive reform, in which Massenbach was also an exponent of streamlining.25
The most important forum for debate on army reform was the Military Society, founded in 1802, at which officers read papers to each other and discussed the implications for Prussia of the current European military situation. The dominant figure in the society was Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst, a man of peasant birth who had risen swiftly through the ranks in his native Hanover and entered the Prussian service in 1801 at the age of forty-six. Scharnhorst called for the introduction in Prussia of the Napoleonic divisional system, and the establishment of a territorial militia as a reserve force. Others, such as Karl Friedrich von dem Knesebeck (a born Prussian subject), drew up ambitious plans that foresaw the creation of a genuinely ‘national’ Prussian force.26 As these efforts show, the Prussian military did not remain sealed off from the process of criticism and self-scrutiny that had begun to transform the relationsh
ip between the state and civil society in the 1780s and 1790s.
29. Gerhard Johann von Scharnhorst, before 1813, by Friedrich Bury
Little was done before 1806 to put these ideas into effect. All major reforms threaten vested interests and tentative efforts to install a vestigial general staff organization in 1803 were greeted with open hostility by office-holders within the traditional administration. There was strong resistance to innovation among the long-serving senior officers, some of whom, such as Field Marshal Möllendorf, owed their reputations to distinguished service in the Seven Years War. Möllendorf, a blimpish figure who was eighty-two when he walked calmly through the French fire at Jena, is reported to have responded to all reformist proposals with the words: ‘This is altogether above my head.’ But such men commanded enormous respect within the old Prussian army and it was psychologically difficult for anyone, even the king himself, who had grown up under the shadow of his famous uncle, to stand up to them. In a revealing conversation from 1810, Frederick William recalled that he had wanted a thorough reform of the military long before the war of 1806–7:
… but with my youth and inexperience, I didn’t dare, and instead trusted those two veterans [Möllendorf and the Duke of Brunswick] who had grown grey under their laurels and surely understood all this better than I could [… ] If I had tried as a reformer to oppose their opinions and it had gone badly, everyone would have said: ‘The young gentleman has no experience!’27
The defeats at Jena and Auerstedt changed this situation utterly and the monarch was quick to seize the initiative. In July 1807, when the shock of Tilsit was still fresh, the king established a Military Reorganization Commission, whose task was to draw up all the necessary reforms. It was as if the Military Society of the pre-war years had been reincarnated as an organ of government. The presiding spirit was Scharnhorst, supported by a quartet of gifted disciples – August Wilhelm Neidhardt von Gneisenau, Hermann von Boyen, Karl Wilhelm Georg von Grolman and Karl von Clausewitz. Gneisenau was the son of a non-noble Saxon artillery officer who had joined the Prussian army as a member of the royal suite (a predecessor of the general staff) in 1786. Promoted to major after the battles of October 1806, Gneisenau found himself in command of the fortress of Kolberg on the Baltic coast of Pomerania, where he managed, with the help of some patriotic townsfolk, to hold out against French forces until 2 July 1807.
Boyen was the son of an East Prussian officer who had attended the lectures of Immanuel Kant at the University of Königsberg and had been a member of the Military Society since 1803. Grolman had served as an adjutant under Hohenlohe at Jena, before fleeing to East Prussia, where he joined the staff of the L’Estocq Corps, the Prussian force that fought the French alongside the Russians at Preussisch-Eylau. Like Gneisenau, Grolman had the good fortune to be associated with the continued Prussian resistance in 1807, rather than with the defeat of the previous autumn. Clausewitz, the youngest of the group (he was twenty-six in 1806), had joined the army as a twelve-year-old cadet and was selected in 1801 for admission to the Institute for Young Officers in Berlin, an elite training facility of which Scharnhorst had just been appointed director.
These men attempted to carve a new kind of military entity out of the ravaged hulk of the Prussian army. There were important structural and technical improvements. The military executive was tightened up along the lines proposed by Stein. This involved, among other things, the creation of a ministry of war, within which the rudiments of a general staff organization could begin to coalesce. Greater emphasis was placed on the deployment of flexible units of riflemen operating in an open order of battle. Scharnhorst oversaw crucial improvements to training, tactics and weaponry. Appointments were henceforth to be meritocratic. In the words (written by Grolman) of an order of 6 August 1808: ‘All social preference that has existed is henceforth and hereby terminated in the military establishment, and everyone, whatever his background, has the same duties and the same rights.’28 The psychological impact of this and other innovations was heightened by the fact that they coincided with an unprecedented purge of the Prussian military leadership. In all, some 208 officers were removed from service following a forensic analysis of the defeat carried out by a committee of the Military Reorganization Commission. Of 142 generals, seventeen were simply dismissed and a further eighty-six received honourable discharges; only just over a quarter of all Prussian officers survived the purge.
The immediate objective of the order of 6 August 1808 was to ensure a better command cadre in the future. The reformers also had wider objectives. They aimed to overcome the caste-like exclusiveness of the officer corps. The army was to become the repository of a virtuous patriotism, which in turn would infuse it with the élan and commitment that had been so manifestly lacking in 1806. The objective was, in Scharnhorst’s words, ‘to raise and inspire the spirit of the army, to bring the army and the nation into a more intimate union…’29 To effect an all-embracing consummation of this new relationship between the army and the Prussian ‘nation’, the reformers argued for universal military service; those who were not called up directly into the army should be liable for service in a territorial militia. The exemptions that had kept substantial parts of Prussian society (especially in the towns) out of the army should now be dismantled. Orders were also issued phasing out the more draconian corporal punishments for disciplinary infractions, most importantly the infamous ‘running of the gauntlet’, because these were felt to be incompatible with the dignity of a bourgeois recruit. The task of an officer was not to beat or insult his charges, but to ‘educate’ them. It was the culmination of a long process of change; military punishments had been under intermittent review since the reign of Frederick William II.30
The most influential expression of this sea-change in values was Clausewitz’s On War, an encompassing philosophical treatise on military conflict that remained unfinished when the author died of cholera in 1831. In Clausewitz’s typology of military engagements, soldiers were not cattle to be herded across the battlefield, but men subject to the vicissitudes of mood, morale, hunger, cold, weariness and fear. An army should not be conceptualized as a machine, but as a conscious willed organism with its own collective ‘genius’. It followed that military theory was a soft science whose variables were partly subjective. Flexibility and self-reliance, especially among junior commanders, were vital. Coupled with this insight was an insistence on the primacy of politics. Military engagements must never be allowed, Clausewitz argued, to become an end in themselves – an implicit critique of Napoleon’s ceaseless war-making – but must always serve a clearly defined political objective. On War thus represented a first attempt to acknowledge and theorize the new and unpredictable forces unleashed by Napoleonic ‘big war’, while at the same time binding them to the service of essentially civilian ends.31
LAND REFORM
‘The abolition of serfdom has consistently been my goal since the beginning of my reign,’ Frederick William III told two of his officials shortly after the Peace of Tilsit. ‘I desired to attain it gradually, but the unhappy condition of our country now justifies and indeed demands speedier action.’32 Here again, the Napoleonic shock was the catalyst, not the cause. The ‘feudal’ system of land tenures had long been under growing pressure. Some of it was ideological, and resulted from the percolation of physiocratic and Smithian liberal ideas into the Prussian administration. But the economic rationale for the old system was also wearing thin. The growing use of waged employees, who were plentiful and cheap in an era of demographic growth, emancipated many estate owners from dependence on the labour services of subject peasants.33 Moreover, the late eighteenth-century boom in grain prices produced new imbalances within the system. The better-endowed peasants took their grain surpluses to market and rode the boom while paying wage-labourers to perform their ‘feudal’ services for them. Under these conditions, the existence of a large subject peasantry whose secure land tenures were paid for with labour rents came to seem economically c
ounterproductive. Labour dues, once a highly valued attribute of Junker manorial governance, now functioned like fixed rents within a system that benefited the better endowed peasants as ‘protected tenants’.34
Two Stein associates, Theodor von Schön and Friedrich von Schroetter, were entrusted with the task of preparing a draft law outlining reforms to the agrarian system. The result was the edict of 9 October 1807, sometimes called the October Edict, the first and most famous of the legislative monuments of the reform era. Like so many of the reform decrees, it was more a declaration of intentions than a law as such. The edict heralded fundamental changes to the constitution of Prussian rural society, but there was a bombastic vagueness about many of its formulations. Essentially, it aimed to achieve two objectives. The first was the liberation of latent economic energies – the preamble declared that every individual should be free to achieve ‘as much prosperity as his abilities allow’. The second was the creation of a society in which all Prussians were ‘citizens of the state’ equal before the law. These objectives were to be achieved through three specific measures. First, all restrictions on the purchase of noble land were abandoned. The state at last gave up its futile struggle to maintain the noble monopoly in privileged land and created for the first time something approximating a free land market. Second, all occupations were henceforth to be open to persons of all classes. For the first time there was to be a free market in labour, untrammelled by guild and corporate occupational restrictions. This too was a measure with a long prehistory: since the early 1790s, the abolition of guild controls had been the subject of repeated discussions between the General Directory and the Factory Department in Berlin.35 Thirdly, all hereditary servitude was abolished – in a hugely suggestive but tantalizingly imprecise formulation, the edict announced that ‘from Saint Martin’s Day [11 November] 1810, there will only be free people’ in the Kingdom of Prussia.
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