Frederick the Great

Theodor Schieder, H.R. Scott, Sabina Krause

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317901518
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Since its publication in 1983, Theodor Schieder's study has been recognised as the most distinguished modern study of Prussia's most famous King and a leading figure of the eighteenth century. This abbreviated translation provides the first comprehensive scholarly treatment in English published since 1975.

CHAPTER 1

Frederick’s youth: the international situation and personal destiny

EUROPE’S POLITICAL CONSTELLATION

The ruler known to history as Frederick II of Prussia was born on 24 January 1712. He was the son of the Prussian Crown Prince, Frederick William, and his wife, Sophia Dorothea of Hanover. The couple’s fourth child, Frederick followed two brothers who had died in infancy and a sister, Wilhelmina, who was three years older than him. Destiny had determined him to be the heir to the Prussian throne in accordance with the law of succession through male primogeniture.

These simple facts record an event which was to have an extraordinary effect upon the history of Germany and Europe during the eighteenth century. It was unusual for men of real distinction to ascend Europe’s monarchical thrones, whether by traditional right or as a result of veiled usurpation. The offspring of marriage alliances formed within the narrow confines of ruling families were unlikely to have inherited any extraordinary qualities. They were influenced rather by an upbringing in a world which, despite placing them in positions of authority, expected a certain, but often limited, talent for the tasks of political and military leadership. A prince was, from the very beginning, put on a pedestal. In public it was never questioned whether he merited this elevated position as a man, statesman and military leader. The world of the ruler was a traditional one, and it did not encourage or expect great achievements from the favoured individual, since power and splendour were bestowed upon him as a matter of course. The situation was quite different from that in revolutionary societies, in which the ascent to power involved exceptional risks and possessed none of the safeguards, provided by inherited right, which could prevent a fall into the abyss. Most legitimate rulers, in any case, contented themselves with upholding the status quo. Those who attempted to do more than this were compelled to extract herculean efforts from the state apparatus which they had inherited and attempt a revolution from above.

The eighteenth century offers several examples of such men: Charles XII of Sweden appeared to many, including Frederick himself, to represent the epitomy of failure; Peter the Great of Russia provided the model for creating a powerful empire through internal and external reorganisation. Since the time of the Elector Frederick William (the Great Elector, 1640–88) in the seventeenth century, Prussia had been a second-rate state, showing little, if any, signs of ever playing the role of a great power. In order for it to become a great power, decisive dynastic leadership was needed, and this was provided first by the Great Elector and then by King Frederick William I (1713–40). The leader who wished to transform Prussia into a great power had to rely on and make use of the existing administration and army. The option of proceeding, as Napoleon and Lenin would do, after a destruction of the existing political and military order, did not exist. In order to achieve the goal of territorial aggrandisement and political expansion, such a leader was not obliged continually to destroy his enemies, but needed only to summon the ‘courage of his soul’ (J. Burckhardt) to deter external foes. Frederick overthrew Europe’s existing political order, not Prussia’s social order, which he was always concerned to uphold.

This overthrow depended for its success upon Frederick’s possession of three qualities rarely found in the same person: political decisiveness, an aptitude for military leadership and practical administrative talent. It is pointless to ask why and from whom the King had inherited these traits of character. His ancestors included such outstanding personalities as the leader of the Dutch Revolt, William the Silent, and the French Huguenot, Admiral de Coligny, both of whom possessed such qualities, but these names can also be found in the genealogies of other rulers. The enigma of great ability cannot be solved through recourse to ancestral lineage, nor simply through an analysis of the historical context. More important is the process whereby circumstances and trends combine with individual potential and allow it to develop. To chart this interaction is the specific responsibility of historical scholarship. Frederick, marked by his fateful youth, sought and found the great opportunity in the history of his time.

He was born during the final stages of the War of the Spanish Succession. In the month before his birth, diplomats assembled at the Peace Congress of Utrecht and this led, a year later in April 1713, to the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. Resistance to France’s hegemony and her claim to the Spanish inheritance (the possession of which would have made her unassailable) led to the introduction of a new principle of political order, the balance of power. Its proponent was England, the island state which was preparing to rule the oceans, dominate maritime trade, and build an Empire beyond the seas. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, it had begun to develop a new type of constitutional structure in which power was shared by Crown and Parliament, at a period when absolute monarchy was the order of the day in most other European states. From that time onwards, the struggle for supremacy on the world stage revolved around the Anglo-French conflict, on which King Frederick II’s calculations depended so vitally when he embarked on his first, decisive action, an action which was to have a determining influence on his whole life – the conquest of Silesia. Once the great western conflict of the Spanish Succession was on the wane, the simultaneous struggle in northern and eastern Europe continued unabated. Peter the Great’s wide-ranging internal reconstruction and the increased influence which European technology and ideas now had within Russia had prepared the way for her formidable advance westwards. She drove Sweden from the Baltic coast, destroyed the Swedish great power position and made her own presence felt throughout the Baltic region. Poland-Lithuania, too, became totally caught up in the maelstrom of Russian politics. The Empire of the Tsars had carved its way into the whole European states system. Europe’s politics could no longer be conducted without paying due regard to the rising power on its eastern rim.

As a result of her extended geographical position, straggling across the territory between the rivers Rhine and Memel, Prussia was located directly between the two spheres of conflict in East and West. Various treaties tied her to the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV, and compelled her to provide troops to serve in the Southern Netherlands, Italy and the Rhineland. This did little to advance Prussia’s own interests, except perhaps in the Lower Rhine region. Only after the Peace of Utrecht did the main focus of her own military activity shift to the neighbouring territory of Pomerania, which lay to the north of Brandenburg. In October, 1713, Russia allowed Frederick William I, who had become King on 25 February of that year, to occupy the important port of Stettin and the territory up to the river Peene until the peace settlement should be concluded. This important acquisition was not formally approved until 1720, when Frederick was just eight years old.

During the years when the eighteenth-century power constellation was taking shape, a new generation of monarchs and even new ruling families ascended Europe’s thrones. These changes were particularly significant at a period when political power, in continental Europe at least, was personified by absolute monarchy. In 1711 Emperor Joseph I had died after only a brief reign. The resulting accession of his brother, Charles VI, made it inevitable that the Spanish inheritance would be separated from the Austrian Habsburgs, and thus laid the seeds for the destruction of the great alliance between the two branches of the Habsburg family. The year 1714 saw the accession to the British thrones of the Hanoverian dynasty in the person of George I, brother of the Queen of Prussia. This, too, was an event with considerable repercussions for German politics. On 1 September 1715, Louis XIV died. He had been responsible for the most glorious epoch in France’s history, but at the same time it had become clear that the power of the French monarchy had reached its zenith at home and abroad. The concept of a French ‘universal monarchy’, the foundation of which would have been the union of France and Spain, had clearly failed. No European alignment could henceforth come about without the approval of Great Britain. For some time, however, it was impossible to prevent the hegemony of the French language, French thought and French culture, a process which did not reach its climax until the age of the Enlightenment, even though the English contribution to that movement was to be significant.

The death of Louis XIV signalled a transition which was already under way: Europe lost its monarchical focal point from which the other continental rulers had all taken their lead. The move away from the image of kingship personified by this sovereign can nowhere be more clearly observed than with the accession in 1713 of Frederick William I, the son of the first King in Prussia. The change of personnel in the five years between 1710 and 1715 did not produce a European crisis, unlike the momentous and almost simultaneous changes in 1740 in Prussia, Russia and Austria, with the deaths of Frederick William I, the Russian Empress Anna and the Emperor Charles VI. The earlier changes, however, certainly did not have a stabilising effect, since the exhausted French monarchy henceforth faced severe domestic problems which proved enduring, while the dynastic change in Britain as well as the question of the succession in Austria brought with them difficulties which would loom large during the ensuing decades.

Following the establishment of the French Bourbon dynasty in Spain in 1700 and the resulting gain by a French company of the monopoly for the black slave trade to Spanish America, Britain secured a share in this odious human commerce, gaining the right to send an annual ship under the Asiento agreement (March 1713), an addition to the Anglo-Spanish peace settlement. Spain had declined economically as well as politically; while the Dutch Republic had lost its dominant position both in the Baltic grain trade and in commerce with the East Indies, and had been decisively eclipsed by Great Britain. Sweden’s dominium maris baltici, her military and political dominance of the Baltic, which was also based upon economic control of its ports, had slowly been eroded since its peak around 1660; now, with the loss of Stettin, a further important component of its position was removed. The French monarchy never recovered from the strains caused by the wars of Louis XIV and by France’s simultaneous emergence as a maritime as well as a continental power. Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century she entered once more into a worldwide conflict with England, in North America and India. Frederick II’s seven-year struggle with Austria (the Seven Years War of 1756–63) was merely a sideshow in this crucial global struggle which was being fought to secure the riches of the New World.

In the years following the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, Europe entered a new age in other respects too. Paul Hazard, describing the period 1680–1715, spoke of a ‘crisis of the European conscience’ and highlighted two distinctly opposing cultures: ‘Hierarchy, discipline, an order secured by authority, dogmas which regulated life with a firm hand – that’s what the people of the seventeenth century craved; force, authority, dogmas are what the people of the eighteenth century, their immediate successors, cordially detested … The majority of Frenchmen used to think like Bossuet, and yet suddenly the French think like Voltaire; it is a revolution …’. Pierre Bayle referred to the two forms of thought as that of the ‘believers’ and that of the ‘rationalists’, whose struggle for adherents was watched with interest by all Europe’s intellectuals. A few decades later this struggle was played out afresh within the Prussian King’s own family, in the conflict between Frederick William I and his son, Crown Prince Frederick, the friend of Voltaire.

What role did Prussia play in the world in which Frederick grew up? It was still not a unified state, as the name might imply, and took its designation from the most eastern of the Hohenzollern territories. East Prussia was that land which was ‘of no importance to anyone but God and its own subjects’ and which had been elevated to the status of a kingdom by the Elector Frederick III (1688–1713), after 1701 ‘King in Prussia’ as Frederick I. Since Kings, unlike Electors, could create titled nobility, the Hohenzollerns were obliged to locate their royal dignity outside the Empire, within which that right was a powerful and profitable Habsburg monopoly which Vienna was determined to uphold. Apart from the other ruling titles and possessions held by the Prussian monarchy, the Hohenzollerns significantly held sway over the Electorate of Brandenburg. From this core the authority of the ruling family extended to all the outlying territories. At the time of the accession of Frederick William I, however, the process of territorial integration was only in its infancy. What Voltaire would later refer to mockingly as a ‘kingdom of mere border strips’ was an ‘aggregate of territories’ which stretched from the Rhine to the Memel, but did not amount to a solid, unified geographical area except in its central province, the Electorate of Brandenburg.

Apart from the functions exercised by the court and the absolute ruler himself, along with his councillors and close advisors, the only institution which covered all the Hohenzollern territories was the Prussian army, which was to be considerably strengthened under Frederick William I. Under the previous ruler, Frederick III/I, it had been the enormously lavish court with its array of honorific offices which had represented the rudimentary elements of a unified state, though it conveyed the impression rather than the reality of power and also devoured the monarchy’s budget. The international position of the Prusso-Brandenburg state was that of an auxiliary whose army could decisively tip the military balance and which was therefore courted by all sides, as – for example – were other second-rank states such as Savoy-Piedmont or Bavaria. Prussia still lacked most of the essential attributes of a real great power. The adolescent Hohenzollern monarchy simply displayed the intention to become one, particularly since becoming a kingdom. It did not possess decisive political clout, despite the efforts of the Great Elector. The principal reason for the weakness of this political entity was its territorial fragmentation; this was much more acute than that of other dynastic creations within the Empire. In contemporary eyes, its size in 1713 of 2,043.67 square miles and population of 1.65 million qualified it, at most, as a second-rate power.¹

The capital was as incomplete as the state itself. Berlin had only existed as a unified town since 1709 and the amalgamation of the city with the outlying districts of Cölln, Dorotheenstadt, Friedrichsstadt and Friedrichswerder. With around 56,000 inhabitants, the capital was more than double the size of the ‘Royal residence and principal town of East Prussia’, Königsberg, which had barely 25,000 inhabitants. By the end of Frederick the Great’s reign, the disparity was even more striking: Berlin’s population numbered 147,000 in 1786, while Königsberg at much the same time had only 48,692 inhabitants. Berlin grew along with the Hohenzollern monarchy: the city was politically and socially a creation of the state and its court. It had a military garrison, factories, palaces and a distinct social structure. Around 1720, the proportion of Huguenot refugees amounted to some 9 per cent of the total population. This percentage was considerably higher than the national average and was indicative of the fact that the state had not yet mustered the strength to build up its capital by itself.

Unlike the cities of Karlsruhe, Ludwigsburg or Rastadt, which were also the seats of ruling families and the locations of their princely courts, Berlin was not an artificial creation, but grew from humble beginnings as a small provincial town to become the capital city of an expanding territorial state. In its expansion, the years around 1700 were of particular importance architecturally, when the ambitious first King in Prussia and his Queen, Sophia Charlotte, provided artistic momentum to the Hohenzollern state. The focal point of this building programme was Berlin’s late-sixteenth-century Renaissance town palace, which may well be described historically as a ‘memorial in stone to the Hohenzollern dynasty’. Significant alterations were made in Frederick I’s time, when Andreas Schlüter, entrusted with the rebuilding, transformed it by converting three wings of the inner courtyard and refurbishing the façade into a Baroque construction of such colossal splendour that it conveyed the impression of a powerful Prusso-Brandenburg state, even if the reality was a little different. It resembled the palace in Stockholm with its massive block shape, which gave the impression of a fortress, and blended the particular North German Baroque style with an Italian influence. The further rebuilding, following Schlüter’s downfall, was supervised by the Swedish architect Johann Friedrich Eosander, Freiherr von Göthe, who wished to give expression to the confidence of the new kingdom by adding a high dome, which was not, however, completed until the nineteenth century. Eosander von Göthe worked in Berlin from 1707 to 1715. During that time, his endeavours created the palace as it was known to the young Crown Prince Frederick. Many of Eosander’s great plans, however, remained uncompleted.

In the years around 1700 the Hohenzollerns followed the example of their own high nobility who, through the building of castles, had erected princely memorials for themselves, and it was only this which transformed Berlin into a city which was fit to be a royal capital. Between 1695 and 1699, Lietzenburg palace was built near the village of Lietzow for the Electress, later Queen, Sophia Charlotte. After her death in 1705, it was renamed Charlottenburg. The garden palace of Monbijou, built by Eosander between 1703 and 1710, was a present from Frederick I to the Queen, who gave concerts and balls there. It was to remain the private residence of subsequent Prussian Queens. This architectural programme, which also included ecclesiastical buildings such as the church of Sophia, built in 1712, formed the basic core of the new royal capital, before the focal point of the monarchy moved to Potsdam. The plans for the rebuilding of Berlin’s cathedral, a task for which the Dutchman Jean de Bodt was signed up, were never completed. Likewise the colossal plan adopted by Frederick I in 1704 to allow the architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach to create a Prussian Versailles never came to fruition, though Fischer von Erlach did submit plans. The scheme’s purpose had been to put the young kingdom on an equal footing with the established powers – a bold concept, though one which was somewhat premature.

The world of the court stretched beyond the capital into the Mark Brandenburg, and here two locations are of particular interest: Königswusterhausen and Rheinsberg. Königswusterhausen, or ‘Wendisch-Wusterhausen’ as it was originally known, belonged as early as 1683 to the Crown Prince, later King, Frederick, who passed it on to his ten-year-old son, Frederick William, in 1698. Throughout his life, Frederick William had a special affection for this palace, which he rebuilt and refurbished. There, he created a model of an idealised state, and spent at least two months a year during the hunting season. It was already clear that this was a favoured retreat when, after his own accession as King, it was used in the autumn of 1713 for festivities dominated by hunting. The gloomy palace of Königswusterhausen had notably cramped living conditions. According to her memoirs, Princess Wilhelmina was forced to share two small attic rooms with one of her sisters. Königswusterhausen was a hateful place for her and for her brother, Fritz, the location where the conflict between father and son was to reach intolerable heights in 1728.

Königswusterhausen is always associated historically with Frederick William I. Rheinsberg, on the other hand, is remembered as the place where, between 1736 and 1740, Crown Prince Frederick spent his happiest years. In the previous century, it had been bestowed by the Great Elector on General Du Hamel, who promptly sold it. Frederick William I acquired Rheinsberg in 1734 and bestowed it upon his son, who employed the noted architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff to rebuild it between 1737 and 1739. The result was distinctly reminiscent of the Trianon at Versailles, since Frederick envisaged transplanting ‘a piece of France … into the sandy Mark’ (P. Gaxotte). The transition from Schlüter to Knobelsdorff also reflected a decisive change...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Preface to the English edition
• Introduction to the English edition
• 1 Frederick’s youth – the international situation and personal destiny
• 2 The King and his Prussia
• 3 The Anti-Machiavel and Machiavellianism
• 4 Prussia and Austria
• 5 Russia – a dangerous neighbour
• 6 Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire: from the Imperial Ban to the League of Princes
• 7 The Frederician state: the theory and practice of government
• 8 Soldier-King
• 9 Philosopher-King
• Afterword
• Further reading
• Chronology of major events
• Maps
• Index