The Prussian Reforms and the Wars of Liberation

Inwardly decayed and incapable of reforming itself, the Prussian state collapsed irredeemably under the blows of the French conqueror. With this the foreign domination over Germany was completed, but it showed itself to be more beneficial for Germany than all the Prussian victories of Fehrbellin and Sedan. It introduced Germany into the circle of modern civilized nations.

However, bourgeois historians really go too far when they claim that the Prussian monarchy and the Junkers were filled with shame and repentance when the consequences of their century old sins were revealed, and voluntarily began work on the Stein-Hardenburg legislation. These, they go on to say, gained all the advantages of peaceful, legal reform without the tumultuous purge of the French revolution. The reality was nothing like that. On the contrary the King, fleeing to Memel, on January 3, 1807 drove Baron von Stein from his service in ignominy and dishonour – the only one of his ministers who had pushed for internal reform even before Jena, and who had then behaved coolly and bravely in the catastrophe.

For the time being the Prussian despot leant on the aid of the Russians, which the Tsar gave willingly, even if more for his own sake than for that of the King. The Tsar had reason to be worried, since the French army, victoriously pursuing the Prussian troops, had advanced to the Russian border, and he waged war in East Prussia only to turn the Prussian frontier province into a desert that would hinder the French armies from crossing the Russian border. On the other hand Napoleon, with the overthrow of Germany now complete, had reached the summit of his victorious career. He had marched in triumph through the whole of civilised Europe and stood on the frontiers of a huge empire whose primitive barbarism had never yet been broken. The heir of the French revolution was tempted to his fall. He took the fateful step that was to lead him downwards from now on. In the Treaty of Tilsit (July 7, 1807) he signed peace and friendship with the Tsar to share the domination of the world with this exponent of Asiatic despotism.

The Prussian King was the first to bear the cost of this new friendship. He was betrayed by his Russian allies as much as he was mauled by his French enemies. The Treaty of Tilsit forced him to give up half of his territory. Napoleon turned the former Polish portions into the Duchy of Warsaw and gave them to the King of Saxony, and the provinces west of the Elbe, which formed the nucleus of the Kingdom of Westphalia, were handed over to Napoleon’s brother, Jerome. Such were the two sharp spurs that the conqueror dug into the panting flanks of the old Prussian state. In both new creations bourgeois reforms were introduced; bondage and serfdom in particular were abolished. In this connection Napoleon ordered the Prussian King to recall Baron von Stein, whom he had just driven out of his service in ignominy and dishonour, and to entrust him with supreme control of Prussian affairs.

Stein (1757-1831) spent only a little over a year at the head of the Prussian state, from October 1807 until November 1808. He was no revolutionary, and not even a liberal in the modern sense of the word, basically not only a noble but also a friend of the nobility. But he came from the civilized West and had, to a certain extent, seen the world. He had found his ideal of aristocratic self-government in England, so that he stood head and shoulders above the clod-hopping Junkers east of the Elbe. And if his reforms did not go too far, he did possess the necessary strength and energy to impose them at all in the face of the King’s stupidity and the obstinate class selfishness of the Junkers

There were, principally two of them: new Municipal Statutes and the so-called October Edict of October 9, 1807. The Municipal Statutes were rather progressive for their time. They restored to the towns control over their finances, the poor and the school system. They shifted the center of gravity of municipal administration to an assembly of town councillors who were to be elected by a franchise which, if not universal, was not significantly limited, and was secret and equal. And it limited state supervision essentially to the authority to check that municipal elections were properly conducted. In these points, which were decisive from Stein’s point of view, his Municipal Statutes were even superior to those of today, which have in fact in the intervening century only been revised in a retrograde way, in terms of both the legal chicanery involved in extending state supervision and the fact that the urban bourgeoisie have not only still not won the universal franchise, but have allowed the secret, equal ballot to be taken from them.

The October Edict contained two major stipulations. First it abolished the encapsulation of the Prussian state into hereditary social estates by permitting the Junkers to carry on industry and trade while allowing the bourgeoisie and the peasants to purchase aristocratic land. This did no more than transform the caste state into a class state whose classes rest on economic interests. But then the October Edict abolished the hereditary serfdom of the peasants, which did not mean the liberation of the country labourer from feudal chains so much as his transformation from an object of feudal exploitation into an object of capitalist exploitation. While the legislation of the French Revolution had secured for the peasant not only his personal freedom but also his freedom of property, the October Edict stopped short at personal freedom, which was anyway painfully limited both by the notorious Statute of Servants, which, scandalously, is still with us, and by the continuing control of the police and the courts by the landlords. On the other hand, peasant property was to remain laden with all the legal burdens, with compulsory labour and socage, with dues in money and in kind, in short with the whole lumber of feudal rubbish that over the centuries the Junkers had imposed on the peasants by force and trickery.

From the point of view of the emancipation of the peasants, the October Edict limped miserably behind the equivalent legislation in Britain, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark and (within Germany) Austria, Schleswig-Holstein and Baden. Above all, there can be not the slightest comparison with the legislation of the French revolution. This timid start to the emancipation of the peasants was actually rather more favourable than otherwise to the Junkers. A recent historian was not far wrong when he said that the Edict put the peasants in a more precarious position than ever. The peasants could make very little use of their personal freedom, while the Junker could now drive them from their soil and add it to his own acres. The Edict turned the serfs into propertyless labourers.

Nevertheless, the Junkers, in their stubborn selfishness, were outraged by the Edict, particularly since they knew that Stein was by no means prepared to leave it at that. Stein was bitterly opposed to clearances of the peasants. He used to compare the castles of the nobility east of the Elbe, who cleared their peasants off the land instead of improving their conditions, with the lairs of predators who created a desert around themselves and were content only with the silence of the grave. Such a dangerous outlook in a minister could not be tolerated, and the Junkers removed him by the base method of leaking to the French police a letter in which Stein expressed his hostility to France. Covered thus against Napoleon’s anger, the miserable King for the second time dismissed the minister whom he feared as much as did his Junkers.

Thus the Junkers were on top again, but they could not go on running their heads against a brick wall. A ministry of mediocrities that was set up after Stein’s dismissal was bankrupt within the year. It could no longer find the money to pay the war contributions to France, and the Kingdom of Westphalia was becoming a dangerous neighbour and rival because of its bourgeois reforms. In June 1810, Hardenburg (1750-1822) became chief minister. Like Stein he was not born a Prussian, and he possessed a certain measure of bourgeois culture. He could even be called more of a liberal, in the modern sense of the word, than Stein. Superficial and pliant, in the second period of bourgeois reforms which now began, he simply copied the example of the Kingdom of Westphalia; his trade and tax legislation, his Gendarme Edict, his emancipation of the Jews, etc., imitated the Westphalian laws to an often grotesque degree. King Jerome, the eternal optimist, became the pattern for this Prussian reformer. Hardenburg, too, was a thorn in the Junkers’ flesh, but they tolerated him, since he was able to look after their interests for all his liberal manner.

This was particularly so in the Regulatory Edict of September 14, 1811, which was supposed to fix the relationship between landlord and peasant. In this, the privileges of aristocratic property were completely untouched, although some easy promises were made to the peasants about the arrangement of their tenancies. However, the sole aim of this legislation was to arouse them to fight against the French. Scarcely had the enemy been thrown out of the country, than the peasants suffered all the more severely from the 112 Articles that were issued on May 29, 1816 in a ‘Declaration’ on the Regulatory Edict. By these Articles, all the peasants not possessing draught animals, that is the great mass of them, were delivered over bound hand and foot to the Junkers, while the minority of spannfähig peasants (who did possess draught animals) were allowed, by a colossal sacrifice of land and money, to purchase a portion of the land their ancestors had held as free men. It took the revolution of 1848 to finish off finally all feudal privileges, and in fact the Prussian peasant movement did not end until 1865. Two generations were needed to achieve in a miserable and inequitable manner what the French revolution had done in one night. But the great profits that the Junkers made out of the Regulatory Edict of 1811 and the Declaration of 1816 go some way to explain why they showed a certain forbearance for the liberal peccadilloes of their originator.

Miserable and full of holes as the Prussian reforms were after the Battle of Jena, not an atom of what was good in them has anything to do with the voluntary insight of the Monarchy and the Junkers. Grinding their teeth, they submitted to the relentless force of circumstance. Foreign domination weighed down on them with overwhelming strength. Between 1807 and 1812, Prussia had to pay more than a thousand million in war contributions to France, an almost incredible sum for a population of three million who were as poor as church mice. But if foreign domination was ever to be shaken off, military reforms were necessary, and bourgeois reforms were in turn an inevitable precondition for that.

Scharnhorst (1755-1813) was the leading representative of military reform. He was no more of a born Prussian than were Stein and Hardenburg, and he was not even a Junker. On the contrary, he came from a family of Hanoverian peasants, and one could say that, as a peasant, he had a native understanding of the modern methods of war. The Junkers did not like him either, but, more patient than Stein, although less pliant than Hardenburg, he was able with his Lower Saxon toughness to impose his plans and reorganize the Prussian Army, creaking and groaning, with countless difficulties, after the pattern of the French Army.

In the countries belonging to the Confederation of the Rhine, bourgeois reforms were introduced much more thoroughly than they were in Prussia, and they were introduced most thoroughly of all on the left bank of the Rhine, which had been under direct French rule. But to the extent that foreign domination led to bourgeois rule, its own historical justification disappeared. Napoleon himself had forfeited the right to call himself the liberator of the nations once he allied himself with the Russian despot to share world power. It was hardly a meeting of true minds. When they finally got to the bottom of the matter, the Franco-Russian war of 1812 broke out, which then led to the wars of liberation. In these, a united Europe finally broke Napoleon’s military dictatorship. He was deposed in 1814 for the first time and in 1815 for the second and final time. France had to give up all her conquests, and the twenty-year era of revolutionary wars closed with the victory of the old Europe.

Nevertheless, it was no longer the old Europe. The plough of revolution had turned the soil too deeply, even to the edge of the Russian taiga. A return to the conditions that had obtained in Europe before 1789 was impossible. A striking proof of this were the intoxicating slogans of freedom with which both the Russian and the Prussian despots had driven their troops to war. In the proclamation of the Treaty of Kalisch, they promised to create a free and independent Germany, and the King of Prussia even pledged his subjects a real constitution if they would save him his throne.

Admittedly, the fact that the princes could break their promises in the most shameless manner once the victory had been won proves the dual nature of the wars. If the people had overthrown the foreign despot, the princes had overthrown the heir of the bourgeois revolution, and if what followed was not the reconstruction of the old Europe, it was indeed a stale and desolate reaction.