Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (20 page)

We should not see this process simply as something that was unilaterally forced upon the nobility – the policy succeeded because it offered something of value, the prospect of a salary that would assure a higher standard of living than many noble households could otherwise afford, an intimate association with the majesty and authority of the throne, and the status attaching to an honourable calling with aristocratic historical connotations. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the establishment of the canton system represented a caesura in the relationship between the crown and the nobilities. The human potential locked within the noble landed estate was now placed even more securely within the state’s reach and the nobility began its gradual transformation into a service caste. Samuel Benedikt Carsted, pastor of Atzendorf in the Duchy of Magdeburg and sometime field chaplain in the Brandenburg-Prussian army, was thus right when he observed that the canton system constituted ‘the final proof that King Frederick William had acquired the most comprehensive sovereignty’.
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An influential view has it that the cantonal regime created a sociomilitary system in which the hierarchical structures of the conscript army and those of the noble landed estate merged seamlessly to become one all-powerful instrument of domination. According to this view, the regiment became a kind of armed version of the estate, in which the noble lord served as the commanding officer and his subject peasants as the troops. The result was a far-reaching militarization of Brandenburg-Prussian society, as the traditional rural structures of social domination and disciplining were permeated with military values.
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Reality was more complex. Examples of noble landlords who were also local commanders are very rare; they were the exception rather than the rule. Military service was not popular among peasant families, who resented the loss of labour that occurred when young men were taken away for basic training.
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Local records from the Prignitz (to the north-east of Berlin) suggest that the evasion of military service by flight across Brandenburg’s borders into neighbouring Mecklenburg was commonplace. In order to escape service, men were prepared to resort to desperate measures – even professing their willingness to marry the women in their villages upon whom they had fathered illegitimate children – and they were sometimes supported in these efforts by noble
landowners. Moreover, far from bringing a mood of submission and obedience to the estate community, the active and inactive duty soldiers were often a disruptive element, prone to exploit their military exemption from local jurisdiction against the village authorities.
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Relations between local communities and the military were beset with tension. There were numerous complaints about the tyrannical behaviour of regimental officers: exemptions were sometimes disregarded by the officers who came to ‘collect’ recruits, reservists were called up during the harvest season despite regulations to the contrary, and money was extorted in bribes from peasants seeking marriage permits from their local commanders (in some areas this latter problem was so pronounced that there was an appreciable rise in the rate of illegitimate births).
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There were also complaints from the landlords of noble estates, who naturally resented any unwarranted meddling in the affairs of the peasants who constituted their workforce.

Despite these problems, a kind of symbiosis developed between regiments and communities. Although only a fraction of the eligible male population (about one-seventh) was actually called up, nearly all the men in rural communities were listed on the regimental rolls; in this sense, the cantonal system was based upon the principle (though not the practice) of universal conscription. Exemptions came into play only once the enrolments had taken place. All reservists were required to wear their full uniforms in church and they were thus an ever-present reminder of the proximity of the military; it was not unknown for enlisted men to gather voluntarily in town and village squares in order to practise their drilling. The pride that many men felt in their military status may have been sharpened by the fact that the exemption system tended to concentrate enrolments among the less well-off, so that there was a tendency for the sons of landless rural labourers to serve while those of the prosperous peasants did not. Soldiers and reservists thus gradually came to constitute a highly visible social group within the village, not only because the uniform and a certain (affected) military bearing became crucial to their sense of importance and personal worth, but also because the conscripts tended to be drawn from among the tallest of each age group. Boys shorter than 169 cm were sometimes called up for service as porters and baggage handlers, but, for most, diminutive stature was a free ticket out of military service.
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Did the canton system heighten morale and cohesion within serving
regiments? Frederick the Great, who knew the Prussian army as well as anyone and observed the canton system at work during three exhausting wars, believed that it did. In his
History of My Own Times
, completed in the summer of 1775, he wrote that the native Prussian cantonists serving in each company of the army ‘come from the same region. Many in fact know or are related with one another. [… ] The cantons spur on competition and bravery, and relatives and friends are not apt to abandon each other in battle.’
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If we survey the inner history of the Hohenzollern dynasty after the Thirty Years War, two contradictory features attract our attention. The first is the remarkable consistency of political will from each generation to the next. Between 1640 and 1797, there was not a single reign in which territorial gains were not realized. As the political testaments of the Great Elector, Frederick I, Frederick William I and Frederick the Great show, these monarchs saw themselves as involved in a cumulative historical project, each new ruler accepting as his own the unfulfilled objectives of his predecessors. Hence the consistency of intention that can be observed in the pattern of Brandenburg’s expansion and the long memory of this dynasty, its capacity to recall and reactivate old claims whenever the time seemed right.

Yet this apparently seamless continuity between generations belied a reality of recurrent conflict between fathers and sons. This problem arose in the 1630s towards the end of Elector George William’s reign, when the crown prince, Frederick William (the future Great Elector), refused to return from the Dutch Republic, for fear that his father was planning to marry him off to an Austrian princess. He even came to believe that Count Schwarzenberg, George William’s most powerful minister, was plotting his death. The crown prince did eventually rejoin his father at Königsberg in 1638, but the damage done to their relationship was never repaired and George William made no effort to involve his son in affairs of state, treating him instead as a complete stranger. In his Political Testament for his successor the Great Elector later wrote that his own government ‘would not have been so difficult at the beginning’, if he had not been frozen out in this way by his father.
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The wisdom of experience did not suffice to prevent similar tensions arising at the end of the Great Elector’s reign. The Great Elector had never been very impressed by Crown Prince Frederick – his favourite was the older brother Charles Emmanuel, who died of dysentery during the French campaign of 1674–5. Whereas Charles Emmanuel was a talented and charismatic figure with a natural aptitude for the military life, Frederick was highly strung, sensitive and partially disabled by a childhood injury. ‘My son is good for nothing,’ the Elector told a foreign envoy in 1681, when Frederick was a married man of twenty-four.
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The relationship was further complicated by the coldness and mutual distrust between Frederick and the Elector’s second wife, Dorothea of Holstein. Frederick had been his own mother’s favourite child, but, after her death, his stepmother had borne the Elector another seven children and naturally tended to favour these over the offspring of her husband’s first marriage. It was under pressure from Dorothea that the Great Elector agreed to provide for his younger sons through the testamentary partition of his lands, a decision that was concealed from Frederick and that he successfully countermanded after his accession.

The last decade of the Great Elector’s life was thus soured by an increasingly tense family situation. A low point was reached in 1687, when Frederick’s younger brother died unexpectedly after a bout of scarlet fever. Suspicion now deepened into outright paranoia: Frederick believed that his brother had been poisoned as part of a plot to open the way to the throne for the eldest son of the second marriage, and that he himself would be the next victim. He was suffering from frequent stomach pains at this time, probably because of the many dubious powders and potions he was taking to ward off the effects of poison. As the court seethed with rumour and counter-rumour, he fled to the home of his wife’s family in Hanover and refused to return to Berlin, saying that ‘it was not safe for him to be there, since it plainly appeared that his brother had been poisoned.’ The Great Elector was furious and announced that he would cut the crown prince out of the succession. Not until Emperor Leopold and William III of England intervened did it prove possible to reconcile the two men, only months before the father’s death.
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Needless to say, it was quite impossible under these conditions to provide the crown prince with a proper induction into the affairs of state.

Frederick III, later crowned King Frederick I, was determined not to repeat the errors of his predecessors and went to great pains to provide his heir both with the fullest possible training in government and with a quasi-independent sphere of action in which to develop his capacities. As a teenager, he was thoroughly inducted into all the main branches of government. The youthful Frederick William was a difficult, obstreperous child who drove his teachers to distraction (it was said of his long-suffering tutor, Jean Philippe Rebeur, that he would have been happier as a galley slave than as Frederick William’s tutor), but he was always fastidiously respectful in his bearing towards his father. In this case, it was the crisis of 1709–10 that placed the relationship under strain, by bringing the crown prince into open opposition to the ineptitude and mismanagement of his father’s ministerial favourites. Frederick, amiable to the last, avoided an irreparable break by backing down and allowing power to pass to his son. In the last few years of his reign we can speak of a co-regency of father and son. Yet this conciliatory approach did not weaken Frederick William’s resolve after his accession to erase every last trace of the exuberant baroque political culture his father had created. Many of the great administrative enterprises of Frederick William’s reign – from the re-establishment of East Prussia to the purging of corruption and the expansion of the magazine system – can be understood as a reply to the perceived shortcomings of his father’s rule.

The cold war that seethed between Frederick William and his own teenage son, the future Frederick the Great, puts all these earlier conflicts in the shade. Never had the struggle between father and son been waged with such emotional and psychological intensity. The roots of the conflict can be traced in part to Frederick William’s profoundly authoritarian temperament. Since he himself had always been scrupulously respectful in his dealings with his father, even when he was forced by circumstance to join the opposition party, he was completely unable to understand any form of insubordination from his heir. Coupled with this was a conceptual and emotional inability to detach his own person from the administrative achievements of his reign, so that any failure of deference appeared to place his historical accomplishment, and the very state itself, in jeopardy. It seemed to him that the work he had laboured so hard to complete must collapse if the successor did not share ‘his
belief, his thoughts, his likes and dislikes, in short, if the successor were not his mirror-image’.
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It became clear early in Frederick’s life that he would not fulfil these exacting designs. He showed little in the way of soldierly aptitude – he often fell from his horse and was frightened of shooting. His posture and comportment were languid, his hair messy, he slept late, enjoyed being alone and was often to be found reading novels in the rooms of his mother and sister. Whereas Frederick William had been frank, even brutally honest, even as a small boy, Frederick was oblique, ironic, as if he had already learned to hide his true nature from the hostile eyes of his father. ‘I would like to know what is going on in this little head,’ the king remarked in 1724, when Frederick was twelve years old. ‘I know for sure that he does not think as I do.’
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Frederick William’s solution was to step up the pressure on the crown prince by subjecting him to a gruelling routine of daily chores – military reviews, inspection tours, council meetings – all timetabled to the very last minute. In a letter written when Frederick was in his fourteenth year, the imperial ambassador, Count Friedrich Heinrich von Seckendorff, observed that ‘the crown prince, despite his young years, looks as elderly and stiff as if he had already served on many campaigns.’
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But as even Seckendorff could tell, these measures were unlikely to have the desired effect. Instead they merely hardened and deepened Frederick’s opposition. He became an adept at resisting his father’s will by a kind of sly civility. When the king asked him at a review of the Magdeburg regiments in the summer of 1725 why he was so often late in arriving, Frederick, who had slept in, replied that he needed time to pray after he had dressed. The king answered that the prince could just as well say his morning prayers while he was being dressed, to which the boy replied: ‘His Majesty will surely allow that one cannot pray properly if one is not alone, and that one must set aside a time specifically for praying. In such matters one must obey God rather than men.’
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