Frederick William IV
Frederick William IV was King of Prussia from 7 June 1840 until his death in 1861. Also referred to as the "romanticist on the throne", he was deeply religious and believed that he ruled by divine right. He feared revolutions, and his ideal state was one governed by the Christian estates of the realm rather than a constitutional monarchy.
In spite of his conservative political philosophy, he initially pursued a moderate policy of easing press censorship, releasing political prisoners and reconciling with the Catholic population of the kingdom. During the German revolutions of 1848–1849, he was initially forced to accommodate the people's revolutionary sentiments, although he rejected the title of Emperor of the Germans offered by the Frankfurt Parliament in 1849, believing that it did not have the right to make such an offer. In December 1848, he dissolved the Prussian National Assembly when he found its constitutional proposals too radical. At the urging of his ministry, which wanted to prevent a renewal of unrest, he imposed a constitution with a parliament and a strong monarch. He then used the Prussian military to help put down revolutionary forces throughout the German Confederation.
Frederick William IV had an artistic nature and an interest in architecture. He extended the building ensembles of the Berlin-Potsdam Residence Landscape, Museum Island, and the cultural landscape of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, and he supported the completion of the Cologne Cathedral. All are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
From 1857 to 1861, he suffered several strokes and was left incapacitated until his death. His brother and heir presumptive William served as regent after 1858 and then succeeded him as king.
Crown Prince
Born to Frederick William III and his wife Queen Louise, Frederick William was his mother's favourite son. He was educated by private tutors, including the historian and statesman Friedrich Ancillon. When Queen Louise died in 1810 when Frederick William was 14, he saw it as a punishment from God and linked it directly to his outlook on life. He believed that only by leading a life more pleasing to God would he be able to absolve himself of the guilt he felt for her death.Frederick William's early childhood fell during a period in which the European monarchies were confronted with the revolutionary challenge of the French Revolution. By calling the dynastic tradition into question, the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 helped create the conditions for Frederick William's later political orientation towards historical continuity and tradition. Since there was a danger that he and his younger brother William might be captured by the French after the Prussians lost the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt on 14 October 1806, they were taken to Königsberg in East Prussia on 17 October 1806. After their parents arrived on 9 December 1806, they fled together from the advancing troops to Memel.After Prussia's defeat and the family's return to Berlin, Frederick William's education was adapted more to prepare him for governing. He was generally dismissive of the Prussian reforms that were then underway with the aim of modernising the state from within. His tutor Friedrich Delbrück had instilled in him a disgust of revolutionaries, so that he had no sympathy for Karl August von Hardenberg's insistence that Prussia be reorganised through a "revolution from above". For Friedrich Wilhelm, the "bureaucratic absolutism of a Hardenberg" meant moving away from the "principle of the estates" that he advocated.
The high point of Frederick William's youth was his participation in the campaigns against Napoleon in the Wars of Liberation of 1813/1814 that pushed the French out of Germany. In his experience with war, which showed him to be an indifferent soldier, the boundaries between patriotism and religious fervour became blurred. He saw the conflict as a crusade against the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In many pieces of correspondence from the period, the Crown Prince wrote about religious experiences using elements of the Pietist revivalist movement, including the subjective experience of God, the power of personal prayer and individual striving for salvation and redemption.
Frederick William was a Romanticist, and his devotion to the movement, which in the German states featured nostalgia for the Middle Ages, played a part in his developing a conservative worldview at an early age. In 1815, when he was twenty, the Crown Prince exerted his influence to structure the proposed new constitution of 1815, which was never enacted, in such a way that the landed aristocracy would hold the greatest power. He was against the liberalisation of Germany and aspired to unify its many states within what he viewed as a historically legitimate framework, inspired by the ancient laws and customs of the Holy Roman Empire, which had been dissolved under Napoleon in 1806.
He was a draftsman interested in both architecture and landscape gardening and was a patron of several great German artists, including architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel and composer Felix Mendelssohn. In 1823 he married Elisabeth Ludovika of Bavaria. Since she was a Roman Catholic, the preparations for the marriage included difficult negotiations which ended with her conversion to Lutheranism. There were two wedding ceremonies – one in Munich by proxy according to the Catholic rite, and the other in person in Berlin. The couple had a harmonious marriage, but after Elisabeth had a miscarriage in 1828, it remained childless.
Early reign
Frederick William became king of Prussia on the death of his father in 1840. Through a personal union, he was also the sovereign prince of the Principality of Neuchâtel, which at the same time was a canton in the Swiss Confederation and the only one that was a principality. In 1842, he gave his father's menagerie at Pfaueninsel to the new Berlin Zoo, which opened its gates in 1844 as the first of its kind in Germany. Other projects during his reign – often involving his close collaboration with the architects – included the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Neues Museum in Berlin, the Orangery Palace at Potsdam as well as the reconstruction of Stolzenfels Castle on the Rhine and Hohenzollern Castle, in the ancestral homelands of the dynasty which became part of Prussia in 1850. He also enlarged and redecorated his father's Erdmannsdorf manor house.In 1842, on the advice of Alexander von Humboldt, he founded the separate civil class of the Pour le Merite, the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts. The civil order is still being awarded today.
Frederick William IV's accession to the throne came with great expectations among liberals and nationalists. By beginning his reign with a policy of reconciliation, the new king fulfilled their hopes during his first six months on the throne. Through an amnesty enacted on 10 August 1840, all "political criminals" were released, politically motivated investigations and court proceedings were discontinued, and press censorship was eased.
As a result of the concessions, liberals initially overlooked the fact that Frederick William IV was not of one mind with them. The King intended his policy of reconciliation to restore trust in a medieval-feudal relationship of loyalty between the Prussian people and the monarch, making the liberal reform of the state along the lines of the French constitutional-parliamentary model superfluous. He believed that he derived his close ties to his people from the divine right of grace, which gave him a "sacred insight into the needs of his subjects". Any restriction of his de facto absolutist power seemed to him to be an irresponsible obstruction of his divinely ordained mission.
Religious policy
Frederick William IV was deeply religious. Influenced by Romanticism and the Pietist revivalist movement, he envisioned a Christian state and believed that only Christianity could protect his subjects from revolutionary utopias and reverse the secularisation, growing materialism and other processes of modernisation that he considered harmful. For Friedrich Wilhelm, religion and politics were inextricably linked.In contrast to his father, Frederick William was sympathetic to Catholicism. Under Frederick William III in 1825, the Archbishop of Cologne was arrested in a conflict over the law on mixed marriages. In order to reconcile with the Catholic population, Frederick William IV authorised the founding of the Cologne Cathedral Building Association in 1840 to promote and finance the completion of the Cologne Cathedral. Half of the funding for it came from the Prussian state treasury. For negotiations with the Roman Curia, the King announced in June 1840 that within the Ministry of Culture he would set up a department for Catholic affairs which was to consist exclusively of Catholic councillors.
With the founding of the Protestant Church in Prussia in 1817, in which Calvinists and Lutherans were united, Friedrich Wilhelm's father had created an institution for all Protestants in his kingdom that was directly dependent on the sovereign as the summus episcopus. In response, the Old Lutherans formed their own church in 1830, claiming to represent the "true" Lutheran Church, and were consequently subjected to state persecution. In 1845 Frederick William lifted the ban on the formation of Old Lutheran churches and released imprisoned pastors.
The constitutional question
As part of his policy of reconciliation, Frederick William IV was interested in finding a solution to the question of a constitution for Prussia. At the core of his political philosophy was the doctrine of the organic nation of the estates of the realm, which was based on philosophers such as Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote in 1805: "The only lasting constitution is the monarchy of the estates, tempered by priests and nobility, and it is also the oldest and best." In the view of the "political romantics", the structure of the estates took the natural inequality of man into account. Individuals should fulfil the tasks and duties that serve the good of society as a whole in the place assigned to them by God. In the Prussian constitutional question, Frederick William IV was not striving for the realisation of a constitutional monarchy but rather a state governed by the Christian estates. He made this clear to the governor of the province of Prussia not long after his coronation:
I feel myself entirely by the grace of God and will feel that way with His help until the end. Without envy I leave splendour and artifice to so-called constitutional princes, who have become a fiction, an abstract concept to the people through a piece of paper .
As his alternative to parliamentary-style popular legislatures, Frederick William IV focussed his attention on the Provincial Estates, the representative bodies of the eight Prussian provinces, which had been founded in 1823. In 1847 he summoned all representatives of the Prussian provincial parliaments to Berlin. He was prepared to give the United Parliament the right to discuss the financing of railways, canals and roads – specifically a request for a 25 million thaler bond for building the Berlin to Königsberg railway. He did not want to levy new taxes or take out loans without the United Parliament's consent, envisioning that their approval would not restrict his power but strengthen it by eliminating future constitutional demands.
In his opening speech, Frederick William reiterated that he did not want a "piece of paper" to come between himself and the people and replace the "old, sacred loyalty with it". He told the deputies of the limits he saw on their duties: "... it is not your job to represent opinions, to want to bring the opinions of the times to the fore.... That is completely un-German and, beyond that, completely impractical."
The majority of the deputies nevertheless did not see themselves as representatives of the estates but of the Prussian people. On 20 April 1847, the parliament sent an address to the King calling for a regular convocation. Laws, they wrote, should only come into force with the consent of the United Parliament. Discrimination based on the estates should be abolished and the citizenry guaranteed legal protection against arbitrary measures by the state. If their demands were not fulfilled, they concluded, the parliament would be forced to reject the King's spending plans. Frederick William stopped attending parliamentary sessions and on 26 June 1847 dissolved the United Parliament.
With the failure of the First United Parliament, the government not only lost its ability to act on fiscal policy – the Prussian National Debt Act of January 1820 stipulating that the government could only take on new debt if it was co-guaranteed by the "imperial estates" remained in force – but also faced increased doubts within Prussia about the legitimacy of the existing state order.