Town Crafts

In the Prussian state, more than three quarters of the population lived on the land, and in the German Confederation more than two thirds. Low as it had fallen, the craft guild system still predominated in the towns. In 1830 it was still on the same level as 1800. In the second half of this period it had healed as best it could the wounds it had received in the endless wars of the first half. Otherwise it showed not the slightest trace of progressive development. It worked on in the time-honoured manner, for local consumption, for better or for worse, narrow and selfish in outlook, abhorring all technical progress and spinning out a shadowy vegetable existence in the close repressive atmosphere of the small town. The individual craft enterprises were tiny; there were almost twice as many masters as there were journeymen. Every journeyman had the hope of becoming a master himself; where crafts were not monopolized, it was also possible to become an established master. Handicrafts lacked the tension of social contradictions.

Nevertheless, matters looked less dismal among the journeymen than they did among the masters. The old journeymen’s associations had collapsed after the Thirty Years’ War, and the power of the princes had forcibly stamped out their tattered remnants in the interests of rising capitalism. The Prussian monarchy was prominent in this. On its instigation, the Imperial Law of 1731 was decreed, suppressing the last resistance of the once so combative and defiant journeymen. The Prussian Statute of Handicrafts of 1733 placed the severest penalties upon infringements of the articles of the Imperial Law; imprisonment, penal servitude and, for recidivists, death. It goes without saying that a strict ban on combinations was then decreed under Prussian law. But it was the very cruelty of this legislation that kept a vague class-consciousness alive among the journeymen, an uneasy, dissatisfied feeling that was constantly inflamed by the rule within the guild system that forced journeymen to be always on the move. In Switzerland, England and France, German artisans got to know advanced conditions that contrasted sharply with the decay at home. Many remained abroad, but others brought freer attitudes home with them.

The ruinous condition of German handicrafts was mirrored in the ruinous condition of their legal status. Already in the eighteenth century, the capitalist policies of enlightened despotism had violated, breached and shaken up the guild constitution; then the storms of the Napoleonic age had raged over it, but they had only really thoroughly swept away the guild where they had completely destroyed feudalism: in Rhenish Prussia, Rhenish Bavaria and Rhenish Hesse. The guild still ruled in the whole of south Germany and in the Kingdom of Saxony, which had already reached a comparatively high level of industrial development. It is true that in the old Prussian provinces free industry existed on paper, but it gave no new impulse to Prussian handicrafts. The towns east of the Elbe had been fleeced so often over the centuries by the princes and the Junkers that they lacked any lively civic spirit.

The Municipal Statutes of 1808 were, it is true, fairly progressive for their time. They freed the towns to a certain extent from the whip of the military and the bureaucracy and restored control over their own finances, education, provision for the poor, and even under some circumstances the police. And even if, like the whole Prussian reform legislation after Jena, it was scrappy and only extorted by the most extreme necessity, after Waterloo it was revised in a retrograde way: the poorer layers of the population were excluded as far as possible from citizenship and the civic authorities were placed under the vexatious supervision of the state bureaucracy. In addition, the unhappy distinction between citizens and temporary residents (Schutzverwandten) had the actual result – although it was illegal – that members of the educated classes only condescended to become citizens when they bought a house and had to do so. The mass of urban citizens were master craftsmen and home-owners who grew up in the narrowest philistinism. Used to the exploitative practices of the guilds, they saw in the new civic freedom a substitute for what they had lost with the introduction of industrial freedom. With comfortably easy consciences they squandered civic lands, devastated civic forests, advanced the boundaries of their gardens until the town wall and moat had disappeared, and even divided the town hall grounds among themselves. The best skat-player in the rifle-club was the hero of this petty bourgeoisie.

The south German petty bourgeois appeared more active, although here, to the East of the Rhine, handicrafts were still fettered by the guilds. Napoleon had forged together the intermediate states south of the river Main out of hundreds of independent scraps, and their princes remained true to their French protector as long as they possibly could, being faced with the penalty of immediate ruin. Now they sought to stabilize their thrones, which were hastily lashed together and still very shaky, on a firmer legal basis of constitutionalism. But this constitutionalism was like their claim to rule: behind it there were nothing but big words. It represented a sort of Hobson’s choice: with their territorial diets (Landtage) the South German princes wanted to provide a counter-weight to the superiority of Austria and Prussia in the Federal Diet (Bundestag), while they could always count on the Federal Diet if their own territorial Diets should ever become unruly. South German constitutionalism could not revolutionize feudal-military Germany, and showed no desire to grasp that particular nettle.

The political ideal of the petty bourgeois as he predominated in Baden, the Palatinate and Württemberg was determined by his economic position. Circumstances permitting, he desired a republic, but a gentle Arcadia of a republic, a peasant and bourgeois republic, modest in dimension, without the great contradictions of historical and social life, without extremes of wealth or poverty, nothing but middle class and mediocrity. He wanted no princes and no civil list, no aristocracy and no standing army, and if possible no taxes. But above all he wanted no active participation in history, no foreign policy, no big industry and no world trade. Had it really been possible for Germany to disintegrate into a number of such hole-and-corner republics, the country would have finally and utterly disappeared from the ranks of the great nations.