Modern Prussian History: 1830-1947

Philip G. Dwyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317886990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The rise of Prussia and subsequent unification of Germany under Prussia was one of the most important events in modern European history.However, the fact that this unification was brought about as a result of the Prussian military has led to many misconceptions about the nature of Prussia, and consequently of Germany, which persist to this day. This collection sets out to correct them. Beginning in 1830, and finishing with the official dissolution of Prussia by the Allies in 1947, the book takes a broad approach: chapters cover the conservatives and the monarchy, industrialisation, the transformation of the rural and urban environment, the labour movement, the tensions between Catholics and Protestants within the state, and the debate about the links between Prussian militarism and the final tragedy of Nazi Germany. By focusing on the social, religious and political tensions that helped define the course of Prussian history, the book also throws light on the development of modern German history.

PART ONE

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Conservatives and the Monarchy

CHAPTER TWO

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Restoration Prussia, 1786–1848

THOMAS STAMM-KUHLMANN

Defining ‘Restoration’

Historians customarily label the period of European history following the defeat of Napoleon and his forced abdication by the French legislature as the ‘Restoration’. The name was derived from the title given by Karl Ludwig von Haller (1768–1854) to his book, Restauration der Staatswissen-schaften (Restoration of the Science of the State), which appeared in six volumes between 1816 and 1834. Haller intended it to be much more than a mere proclamation of the re-enthronement of a handful of monarchs Napoleon had driven from power. When historians speak of ‘restoration’, however, it is exactly this process that is first and foremost in their minds.

In several instances, the return of former monarchs to their old thrones also signified deeper structural changes. In Spain, for example, not only was the king, Fernando VII, reinstated – he had been forced to renounce his throne by Napoleon in 1807 – but so, too, was traditional despotism, thus reversing, so to speak, the course of Spanish history. Even the Inquisition, which had been abolished by Napoleon, was set to work again.

In France, on the other hand, ‘restoration’ could not simply signify a return to the old. Louis XVIII was made king because the victorious Allies considered him to be the legitimate successor of his hapless brother, Louis XVI. As Prussia’s former first minister, Baron von Stein, put it, the re-establishment of the Bourbons was the ‘result of their ancestral right’, which they had not lost in ‘any valid manner’. Nevertheless, Louis XVIII was obliged to accept his crown from the French legislature. The architect of this transfer of power, Napoleon’s former foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, was compelled to explain the spirit of the times to his new royal master. According to Talleyrand, the epoch demanded that, in civilized states at least, supreme power be exercised with the support of representative bodies. Louis XVIII was consequently compelled to maintain both a lower house and a constitution, even though the latter was merely labelled a ‘constitutional charter’. Church land nationalized during the early stages of the French Revolution remained in private hands, and Napoleon’s marshals continued to command the Bourbon army. The reparation of émigrés who had returned in force after the fall of Napoleon became a hotly disputed issue in France, and a means by which the ultras – those who were ‘more royalist than the king’ – were able to exert pressure on Louis XVIII and his moderate government. Any attempt to turn back the course of history, as occurred during the Polignac ministry under Charles X, resulted in social and political upheaval – in this instance, the July Revolution of 1830. Post-Napoleonic France demonstrates, in other words, that the old dynasty could be restored and yet substantial elements of the revolutionary social and constitutional order be retained.

In Austria and Prussia, however, the word ‘restoration’ means little at all in the traditional sense of the word – nobody had to be restored because nobody had been deposed. For the Austrians, a long reform period had ended with the death of Emperor Leopold II in 1792. His successor, Francis II, who ruled until 1835, was not only ridden with the fear of revolution, but with the fear of the Enlightenment in general. He was ‘a stupid and unimaginative defender of the status quo, […] the single most influential Conservative in Germany throughout his long reign of forty-three years’.¹ The Austrian government had been the enemy of all progress long before Metternich appeared on the scene.

The reign of the King of Prussia, Frederick William III (1797–1840), covered roughly the same period as that of Francis II. Both monarchs came to rule before Napoleon seized power, and both died long after him. In Prussia, the spirit of the times demanded that some of the reforms inaugurated after the defeat of the Prussian army in 1806 – such as the liberation of the serfs, freedom of trade and the self-government of cities – were maintained independently of the existence of the Napoleonic empire. In fact, in Prussia, the continuity of rationalism in government, beginning with the accession of Frederick William III to the throne in 1797, was as firm as the continuity of the counter-enlightenment in Austria after 1792. The continuity of governmental practice, in other words, was tied to the personal continuity of the monarchs.

If the term ‘restoration’, and even more so that of a ‘restoration period’, is inadequate when referring to the Prussian monarchy, it can perhaps be used in regard to types of policies implemented by it. There are two considerations here. The first is that, as early as 1814, attempts to thwart the impulse of the Reform Movement were clear. The opposition that started to gather momentum after Stein’s arrival in Memel (Prussia’s provisional capital from 1807 to 1809) had more or less brought the ‘Reform Period’ to an end by 1819, the year of the Karlsbad Decrees, a set of regulations by the German Confederation to suppress liberal and democratic thought and the demand for political participation.² The Karlsbad Decrees were preceded by the Teplitz Agreement of 1819, an understanding between Prussia’s state chancellor, Karl August von Hardenberg, and Austria’s Metternich that meant, for the time being at least, Prussia would not introduce a general form of representative government. If ‘restoration’ is defined as the return to absolutism and the exclusion of any form of the separation of power, Teplitz may well correspond with the beginning of a ‘restoration period’ in Prussia. The term would then become synonymous with the end of all attempts to weaken traditional absolutism as it had been handed down from the days of the Great Elector. For Hardenberg, however, Teplitz did not include the renunciation of any long-term constitutional plans. According to him, the granting of a constitution was compatible with a rigid and authoritarian style of government. Generally speaking, however, the term ‘restoration’ suggests that somehow a new order had been replaced by elements of the old, in the same manner that Napoleon was replaced by Louis XVIII, or his brother Jérôme, King of Westphalia, was replaced by the Elector of Hesse. In this limited sense, there was, of course, no Restoration in Prussia.

The second consideration is that, despite attempts to thwart the Reform Movement, some decisive governmental policies introduced in the wake of Jena–Auerstedt remained untouched. An example is the laissez faire economic policy inaugurated by Hardenberg in 1810. By releasing trade and industry from the constraints of mercantilism and the relics of the guild system, Hardenberg had intended to create continuous economic growth to heal many of the deficiencies of a society of estates that no longer corresponded with the needs of a growing population. This policy of economic liberalism survived in Prussia until the Revolution of 1848.

A sensible use of the term ‘restoration’, therefore, as applied to Prussia must differ from that used in general surveys of European history. Instead, we need to take a look at the major historical trends around 1800. It seems more appropriate to speak of a ‘restoration party’ than a ‘restoration period’ in Prussia.³ It is possible to distinguish between various social, political and intellectual forces within Prussia according to the attitude adopted towards three key challenges: the philosophy of the Enlightenment; the idea of modern sovereignty; and the rise of a modern concept of natural law that made the idea of the social contract acceptable.

Restoration as the programme of a ‘party’

Those in favour of these three tendencies formed what is known as the ‘Party of Movement’, made up of liberals, democrats and radicals.⁴ Those who opposed these three tendencies represented a new force in society – conservatism (the term was taken from an article by the French political writer, Chateaubriand). One type of conservatism – ‘reform conservatism’ – attempted to ward off the dangers of popular sovereignty and revolution by the application of carefully dosed changes. Another type of conservatism was not directed against the Enlightenment, but used rationalism to develop its arguments against revolution.⁵ These latter forces, which were directed against the Party of Movement as well as reform conservatism, together made up what can be referred to as the ‘Restoration Party’. At its origins, the Restoration Party in Prussia-Germany fought its wars mostly on the intellectual front. At its height in 1819, it was able to put such heavy checks on the reform conservatism of Stein and the ‘governmental liberalism’ of Hardenberg that it nearly brought about the failure of the Reform Movement in Prussia.

The intellectual war involving reform versus conservative forces began during the French Revolution. In the years between 1790 and 1800, no less than 800 publications appeared in Germany criticizing the French Revolution or revolution in general. The political and social outlook of this critique of the Revolution has been labelled ‘early conservative’ (frühkonservativ),⁶ even though the use of the term is anachronistic.⁷ In fact, the question goes back even further than 1790. At the root of continental conservatism, we find the old European tradition of civil society (societas civilis) in opposition to the rise of the modern centralized state. Within the paradigm of societas civilis, as founded by Aristotle and continued by St Thomas Aquinas, no separation between household functions, economic and political status existed. Society was divided into estates, and each estate had its role to play in the home (oikos), agriculture, trade, war, the judiciary and government. Modern absolutism tended to monopolize all political functions at one central point, where sovereignty was located. If one accepted this paradigm, however, it did not matter whether sovereignty was imagined to be in the hands of a prince or in the hands of the people. Aristotelianism, it appears, still shaped European political thought, even if the tradition was implicit rather than explicit.

If the nobility and the traditional middle-class elements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries quite often regarded the prince with hostility, this attitude changed with the outbreak of the French Revolution. From that time on, the greatest threat to the political order was considered to be the different egalitarian elements within the Estates (notably within the Third), as the French example (and others before it) amply demonstrated. Consequently, conservatives rallied around the throne and the altar. Later, the Romantic movement portrayed this practical and somewhat opportunistic coalition between conservatives and the throne in terms of the chivalrous vassal protecting his lord.

The acceleration of the historical process towards the end of the eighteenth century brought about a more elaborated version of traditional conservatism. In Klaus Epstein’s words: ‘The raison d’être of conservatism as an articulate movement is conscious opposition to the deliberate efforts of the Party of Movement to transform society in a secular, egalitarian, and self-governing direction’.⁸

In conventional historiography, the Enlightenment or rationalism is often identified with the ideology of revolution, disrespect and atheism. This view was created by propagandists of the Restoration Party; it is to be found, for example, in the reasoning behind Frederick William II’s religious edict (Religionsedikt of 1788. Here we find the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) explicitly named as the cause of many defects of modern society. However, as a close study of the 800 German publications directed against the Revolution before 1800 reveals, there was also a long tradition of enlightened conservatism. About 100 of the 800 books, pamphlets and articles could be considered ‘rational’ or ‘enlightened’ conservative. Rational conservatism, as well as the ‘enlightened despotism’ incorporated in the Prussian General Legal Code (Allgemeines Landrecht) of 1794, proclaimed a homogeneous society of citizens (Staatsbürgergesellschaft), but maintained the necessity of keeping citizens in separate orders, which were essentially differentiated by their professional function.⁹ A survey of the political and philosophical views of Metternich, the leading statesman of the Restoration, reveals him to be a disciple of the Aufklärung.¹⁰ Nevertheless, the constant attacks against the Aufldärung in Germany helped give the Restoration Party its drive and fervour. Consequently, the Restoration Party’s activity, not only in the political but also in the intellectual and religious sphere, needs to be studied.

At the core of political conservatism and, therefore, at the core of the Restoration Party, we find the interests of the traditionally privileged strata of society. These were sometimes middle-class (as in the case of the Osnabrück town jurist, Justus Möser), but, since Prussian towns were of little importance they were mostly aristocratic in character. ‘Conservatism must be understood, in its fundamentals, as a political...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of Prussian monarchs
• List of Prussian heads of state
• Preface
• About the contributors
• Introduction: Modern Prussia – continuity and change
• Part One: Conservatives and the Monarchy
• Part Two: The Urban and Rural Environments
• Part Three: Religion in State and Society
• Part Four: Prussia, the State and Prussianism
• Suggestions for further reading
• Further research possibilities
• Index