Prussian Reform Movement
The Prussian Reform Movement was a series of constitutional, administrative, social, and economic reforms in early 19th-century Prussia. They are sometimes known as the Stein–Hardenberg Reforms, for Karl Freiherr vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg, their main initiators. German historians, such as Heinrich von Treitschke, saw the reforms as the first steps towards the unification of Germany and the foundation of the German Empire before the First World War.
The reforms were a reaction to the defeat of the Prussians by Napoleon I at the battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, leading to the second Treaty of Tilsit, in which Prussia lost about half its territory and was forced to make massive tribute payments to the First French Empire. To make those payments, it needed to rationalize its administration.
To become a great power again, it initiated reforms from 1807 onwards, based on Enlightenment ideas and in line with reforms in other European nations. They led to the reorganization of Prussia's government and administration and changes in its agricultural trade regulations, including the abolition of serfdom and allowing peasants to become landowners. In industry, the reforms aimed to encourage competition by suppressing the monopoly of guilds. Administration was decentralised and the power of Prussian nobility reduced. There were also parallel military reforms led by Gerhard von Scharnhorst, August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, and Hermann von Boyen, and educational reforms headed by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Gneisenau made it clear that all these reforms were part of a single programme when he stated that Prussia had to put its foundations in "the three-faced primacy of arms, knowledge and the constitution".
It is harder to ascertain when the reforms ended—in the fields of the constitution and internal politics in particular, the year 1819 marked a turning point, with Restoration tendencies gaining the upper hand over constitutional ones. Though the reforms undoubtedly modernised Prussia, their successes were mixed, with results that were against the reformers' original wishes. The agricultural reforms freed some peasants, but the liberalization of landholding condemned many of them to poverty. The Prussian nobility saw its privileges reduced but its overall position reinforced.
Reasons, aims and principles
Prussia in 1807
Prussia's position in Europe
In 1803, German Mediatisation profoundly changed the political and administrative map of Germany. Favourable to mid-ranking states and to Prussia, the reorganisation reinforced French influence. In 1805, the Third Coalition formed in the hope of stopping French domination of Europe from advancing further, but the coalition's armies were defeated at Austerlitz in December 1805. Triumphant, Napoleon I continued to work towards dismantling the Holy Roman Empire. On 12 July 1806, he detached 16 German states from it to form the Confederation of the Rhine under French influence. On 6 August the same year, Francis I of Austria was forced to renounce his title of emperor, and dissolve the Empire.French influence had reached as far as the Prussian frontier by the time Frederick William III of Prussia realised the situation. Encouraged by the United Kingdom, Prussia broke off its neutrality, repudiated the 1795 Peace of Basel, joined the Fourth Coalition and entered the war against France. Prussia mobilised its troops on 9 August 1806, but two months later was defeated at Jena-Auerstedt. Prussia was on the verge of collapse, and three days after the defeat Frederick William III issued posters appealing to the inhabitants of Berlin to remain calm. Ten days later, Napoleon entered Berlin.
The war ended on 7 July 1807 with the first Treaty of Tilsit between Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia. Two days later, Napoleon signed a second Treaty of Tilsit with Prussia, removing half its territory and forcing Prussia's king to recognise Jérôme Bonaparte as sovereign of the newly created Kingdom of Westphalia, to which Napoleon annexed the Prussian territories west of the river Elbe. Prussia had had nine million inhabitants in 1805, of whom it lost 4.55 million in the treaty. It was also forced to pay 120 million francs to France in war indemnities and fund a French occupying force of 150,000 troops.
Financial situation
The biting defeat of 1806 was not only the result of poor decisions and Napoleon's military genius, but also a reflection on Prussia's poor internal structures. In the 18th century the Prussian state had been the model of enlightened despotism for the rest of Germany. To the west and south, there was no single state or alliance that could challenge it. Yet in the era of Frederick II of Prussia it was a country oriented towards reform, beginning with the abolition of torture in 1740.The economic reforms of the second half of the 18th century were based on a mercantilist logic. They had to allow Prussia a certain degree of self-sufficiency and give it sufficient surpluses for export. Joseph Rovan emphasises that: Economic development also had to fund and support the military. Prussia's infrastructure was developed in the form of canals, roads and factories. Roads connected its outlying regions to its centre, the Oder, Warthe and Netze marshes were reclaimed and farmed and apple-growing was developed.
However, industry remained very limited, with heavy state control. Trades were organised into monopolistic guilds and fiscal and customs laws were complex and inefficient. After the defeat of 1806, funding the occupation force and the war indemnities put Prussia's economy under pressure. As in the 18th century, the early 19th century reforms aimed to create budgetary margins, notably in their efforts towards economic development.
Administrative and legal situation
Frederick II of Prussia favoured both economic and political reform. His government worked on the first codification of Prussia's laws – the 19,000 paragraph General State Laws for the Prussian States. Article 22 indicated that all his subjects were equal before the law: "The state's laws unite all its members, without difference of status, rank or sex". However, Frederick died in 1786 leaving the code incomplete and was succeeded by Frederick William II of Prussia, who extended the same administrative structure and the same civil servants.The absolutist system started to re-solidify under the obscurantist influence of Johann Christoph von Wöllner, financial privy councillor to Frederick William II. The reforms stalled, especially in the field of modernising society. The editing of the General State Laws was completed in 1792, but the French Revolution led to opposition to it, especially from the nobility. It was then withdrawn from circulation for revision and did not come back into force until 1794. Its aims included linking the state and middle class society to the law and to civil rights, but at the same time it retained and confirmed the whole structure of the Ancien Régime. Serfdom, for example, was abolished in Prussia's royal domains but not in the estates of the great landowners east of the river Elbe. The nobility also held onto its position in the army and administration. In 1797 Frederick William III succeeded his father Frederick William II, but at the time of his accession he found society dominated by the old guard, apart from the General State Laws promulgated in 1794. His own idea of the state was absolutist and he considered that the state had to be in the hands of the sovereign. Before 1806, several observers and high-level civil servants such as Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg underlined the fact that the Prussia state needed restructuring. As Minister of Finances and the Economy, Stein put some reforms in place, such as standardising the price of salt and partially abolishing the export-import taxes between the kingdom's territories. In April 1806, he published Darstellung der fehlerhaften Organisation des Kabinetts und der Notwendigkeit der Bildung einer Ministerialkonferenz. In it, he wrote:
"There should be a new and improved organisation of state affairs, to the measure of the state's needs born of circumstances. The main aim is to gain more strength and unity across the administration."
Start of the reforms
Trigger – the defeat of 1806
Prussia's war against Napoleon revealed the gaps in its state organisation. Following the series of defeats in December 1806, Frederick William III fled from French armies and arrived at Ortelsburg, a small town in East Prussia. On 12 December, he composed the Declaration of Ortelsburg. Besides venting his anger over a chain of capitulations and demanding merciless punishment for those deserters, he also announced a revolutionary measure that any fighting man could be promoted into the officer corps regardless of his class, whether he was a private, warrant officer or prince. Pro-war and a strong critic of his sovereign's policies, Stein was dismissed in January 1807 after the defeat by France. However, Frederick William III saw that the Prussian state and Prussian society could only survive if they began to reform. After the treaty of Tislsit, he recalled Stein as a minister on 10 July 1807 with the backing of Hardenberg and Napoleon, the latter of whom saw in Stein a supporter of France. Queen Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz also supported Stein's re-appointment – indeed, she was more in favour of reform than her husband and was its main initiator. Aided by Stein, Hardenberg and others, she had convinced her husband to mobilise in 1806 and in 1807 she had even met with Napoleon to demand that he review the hard conditions imposed in the treaty. Hardenberg wrote the same year:« I believe that queen Louise could tell the king what the queen of Navarre, Catherine de Foix, said to her husband Jean d'Albret – "If we were born, your dear Catherine and my dear Jean, we would not have lost our kingdom"; for she would have listened to men of energy and asked advice, she would have taken them on and acted decisively. What lacks in personal strength is replaced in this way. An enterprising courage would have replaced a tolerant courage.»Stein set certain conditions for his taking the job, among which was that the cabinets system should be abolished. In its place, ministers had to win their right to power by speaking to the king directly. After this condition had been satisfied, Stein took up his role and was thus directly responsible for the civil administration as well as exercising a controlling role over the other areas. Frederick William III still showed little inclination to engage in reforms and hesitated for a long while. The reformers thus had to expend much effort convincing the king. In this situation, it was within the bureaucracy and the army that the reformers had to fight the hardest against the nobility and the conservative and restorationist forces. The idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant thus had a great influence on the reformers – Stein and Hardenberg each produced a treatise describing their ideas in 1807.