PRUSSIA

The Kingdom of Prussia was in one important respect already part of Eastern Europe, through its possession of the Duchy of Prussia, which most textbooks refer to as East Prussia. The former state of the Teutonic Knights apart, the expansion of Prussia in the eighteenth century consisted of Silesia, taken from the Habsburg Monarchy, and Prussia's share of the Polish Partitions: 'West Prussia' (1772), 'South Prussia' (1793) and 'New East Prussia' (1795).14 Most of the latter and about half of South Prussia were subsequently lost by Prussia in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars and not restored in 1815. Prussian rule was thus limited to a mere decade in some areas, whereas in West Prussia and what became known as Posen (Polish: Poznaii) it persisted down to 1918.

The people who came with the Polish territories were for the most part Polish speakers or Polish Jews, but there were also substantial numbers of German speakers. In West Prussia some of this German population could be traced back to the Middle Ages. A second wave of German immigration, however, had taken place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, encouraged by the Polish—Lithuanian authorities. The result was a sizeable minority of Germans across western and northern Poland, especially in towns. On the other side of the 'nationality frontier', East Prussia had a minority of Polish-speaking, but Lutheran, peasants in its southern and eastern districts, and in Upper Silesia there was still a large Polish-speaking peasantry as well as Polish townspeople. Finally, to the west and north-west of Danzig lived the Kashubians, a Slavic minority of peasants and fishermen speaking a language akin to Polish.

Prussia at the start of our period might best be described as aspirationally absolutist: the king was undoubtedly the 'focal point of government' and aimed for as much control as possible, but was constantly being brought up short by reality.15 Only later in the century did Frederick II exercise effectively absolute power, within certain self-imposed limits.

Prussian policy was governed by certain geopolitical factors. With a population in 1740 of 2.25 million and meagre natural resources, it seemed negligible beside giants like Russia and Austria, and this vulnerability was heightened by the scattered and divided character of its territories, some two dozen parcels of land from the Rhine to East Prussia, covering a span of 800 miles. These territories moreover all had their own institutions, legal systems, traditional elites and customs, in particular their own estates or local representative bodies, which usually consisted of nobles and important townspeople. The king of Prussia, like the Habsburg monarch, had either to negotiate with these traditional institutions or somehow steer around them.

Frederick William I (1713—40) did much to build up the centralised, quasiabsolutist state inherited by his famous son Frederick the Great. A centralisation of state administration, especially revenue collection, facilitated increased spending on the army, which more than doubled in size between 1713 and 1740 to 81,000 men.16 In addition, Frederick William won the agreement of

The Prussian nobility, the Junkers, to a reorganisation of the army, in return for the crown's undertaking not to interfere with serfdom as an institution.

Frederick II (1740—86) thus inherited a formidable army, but equally a well-ordered, cameralist administration with carefully husbanded resources. Unlike his devout father, however, Frederick was a free thinker, utterly contemptuous of religion and unrestrained by considerations of morality in his pursuit of raison d'etat, given Prussia's exposed position. Throughout his reign Frederick explicitly sought absolute power, gathering the direction of foreign policy, for instance, into his hands right from the outset, and after the last of his wars in 1763 increasingly directing all governmental affairs in person. Yet the philosopher king, who prided himself on his enlightened thinking and his personal contacts with the leading minds of the age, did not consider himself a despot, nor would many of his subjects have accepted the charge. The tradition of natural law, after all, was strong in German and Prussian thinking by the eighteenth century: according to Frederick's somewhat selective understanding of this a monarch's subjects owed him absolute obedience, in return for which he was obligated to govern rationally and justly. As Frederick put it in his 'Political Testament' of 1752, 'I have held it to be my duty to work for the good of the state and to do this in all domains.'17 But above all, in a hostile world Prussia had to be strong or it would go to the wall like the Poles, and the safeguards against this were a strong government and an army second to none.

I n accordance with this concept of enlightenment, religious toleration meant something in Frederician Prussia. Not only did Prussia continue to attract immigrants fleeing persecution elsewhere, but (with the significant exception of the Jews) whatever other disadvantages Frederick's new Polish subjects laboured under, religious discrimination was not one of them. In like fashion, enlightened absolutism meant the rule of law, which indeed was the only surety against abuse of power. Frederick abolished torture and reduced the number of capital offences. Prussia was thus, like the Habsburg Monarchy and unlike Russia, a Rechtsstaat or state where the rule of law applied, and the values displayed by the monarch were widespread among the intelligentsia and the bureaucracy, attracting Germans from other states to Prussian service.

I n one important respect Prussia remained akin to the rest of Eastern Europe in this period, in that it did not achieve a breakthrough in economic modernisation. This was in part due to the continuing scarcity of resources, despite the annexation of Silesia and the Polish lands, and in part due to the limitations of protectionism and mercantilism as economic stimulants. But in terms of altering the landlord-peasant relationship, Prussian governments also failed to grasp the nettle. A consequence of Frederick Il's legal reforms was that peasants for the first time had a legal status, but although Frederick personally considered serfdom an evil he was also conscious that the whole of Prussia's great power status was built upon serfdom, in that the Junker landowners provided the backbone of the officer corps. Recent research suggests that peasants in late eighteenth-century Prussia were increasingly aware of their legal rights and invoked them regularly, but it was not until the Napoleonic period that agrarian reform was forced on Prussia.

For the inhabitants of the new territories Prussian rule did not necessarily mean a change for the better. Silesia at the time of its conquest was the richest single province of the Habsburg Monarchy, its lands supporting a population of 1 million and with significant mining, weaving and dying industry, and a major commercial centre at Breslau. Prussian annexation came near to killing this golden goose. Cut off from its traditional economic hinterland, Silesia's trade and industry suffered and its woes were increased not only by the devastation of two wars but also by a harsh Prussian taxation regime which drained the province's economy. Attempts by Frederick's government to foster new industry failed to halt a general decline which left the province with less manufacturing by 1800 than in 1700.

In the former Polish lands it is clear that a Prussian animus against the Poles was at work from the start, although it should be noted that many of the Commonwealth's Germans deplored the Partitions, which the German mayor of Toruii in 1772 denounced as 'insufferable servitude'; Danzig even took up arms against Prussian occupation in 1793.18 From Frederick the Great down, Prussians seemed united in their contempt for the Poles as vain, frivolous and incompetent, 'caught in an eternal anarchy', as Frederick himself put it in 1746.19

In West Prussia, Prussian taxes and administration were imposed, crown estates confiscated and county diets abolished. Frederick was of the opinion that the Poles needed to acquire 'a Prussian character', but by 1777 his policy had shifted to one of using state funds for buying out Polish landowners and replacing them with German ones, in order 'to get rid of the bad Polish stuff'.20 There was a gradual shift in the balance between Polish and German landowners in the province: some of the szlachta sold out and migrated to the still independent Polish Commonwealth; others went bankrupt; some carried on as Prussian subjects. In addition, the Prussian government initiated a policy of colonisation: some 3,200 German peasant families were settled in West Prussia with free land by 1786.

With regard to the 25,000-strong Jewish community in West Prussia, Frederick succumbed to what might be called the prejudice of the enlightened. He despised the Jews for their attachment to what he regarded as an obscurantist religion and made a distinction between supposedly 'useful', wealthy Jews and the 'Jewish ragtag' of poor artisans, traders and the like. By the end of Frederick's reign 7,000 Jews had been expelled from West Prussia into rump Poland — as Hagen comments, 'the first systematic expulsion of any group from Prussia since the sixteenth century' and a blatant departure from Frederick's professed toleration.21

The Partitions of 1793—5 represented the culmination of Prussia's aggrandising Kabinettspolitik, but it is only fair to admit that the government of Frederick William II (1786—97) was animated by a genuine alarm at the potential threat posed to the absolutist state by Poland's constitutional reform, given the simultaneous upheaval in France. Again, Prussian law was extended over the huge new acquisitions, and Polish crownlands as well as lands belonging to the Catholic Church were appropriated. A government report of1793 breathed enlightened condescension towards the 'lackadaisical' Poles who, it was trusted, would soon be brought up to Prussian standards of efficiency and prosperity.22 The authorities were conscious that they could not now simply 'get rid' of either Poles or Jews, and the policies of estate buyouts and wholesale colonisation were abandoned. Instead, Prussian bureaucrats displayed a patronising, almost colonial attitude towards the Polish population, while many regarded a posting to these often surly provinces as, in the words of one, 'the Botany Bay of Prussian officialdom'.23

The uprising of 1794—5, and the essential reasonableness and moderation of the 1791 constitution, even won the sympathy of some Germans for the Polish Commonwealth's fate. Eminent German figures like Herder and Immanuel Kant went so far as to denounce the Partitions, and there was a certain vogue for Kosciuszko as Romantic hero. Conscious of the need to win the allegiance, or at least the compliance, of the Polish elite, the Prussian government even tried to cultivate the szlachta socially in the 1790s. The Polish nobles, however, together with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, held aloof for the most part. The truth was that Poles were themselves divided as to how they should respond to the extinction of their state. Some nobles opted for a demonstrative loyalty to the new order, as the best guarantor of their economic and social position. The majority remained disdainful of and hostile to Prussian rule. In 1794—5 several thousand Poles, nobles and commoners fought against the Prussian army in a bitter guerrilla conflict, and when the fighting was over some estates were confiscated. The Kosciuszko rising, however, had rubbed home not only the Poles' helplessness but also the difficulties of reconciling gentry nationalism, and gentry dominance, with the aspirations of non-nobles.

In the final decade before the Prussian absolutist state met its disastrous defeat at the hands of Napoleon in 1806, the Prussian government took to promoting the mutual study of languages as a means of winning the loyalty of its Polish population. Prussian officials, it was claimed, should be willing to learn Polish, but in return it was time Polish subjects accepted the utility of German as the state language. The aim, clearly, was Prussianisation and not Germanisation, a far cry from the nationalist view of later generations. Poles, it was reasoned, had to accept that they were Prussian subjects. The take-up rate, however, was minimal, not least because the institutional support for such bilingualism never materialised. More ominously, among the Prussian ruling elite 'an overwhelmingly negative perception of native Polish traditions blended with the sanguine ameliorism of the enlightenment to heighten confidence in the distinctive merits of the “Prussian way"'.24 Poles and Germans would continue to develop within Prussia along separate lines.