PRUSSIA

The kingdom of Prussia encompassed the ensemble of lands ruled from Berlin by the Hohenzollern dynasty. With the invasion of Silesia in 1740 and its retention through three wars, Prussia Challenged the hegemony of the Austrian Habsburgs in German Europe and emerged as a major Continental power. The expansion of French power under the emperor Napoleon I (r. 1804–1814/15) led to a catastrophic defeat in 1806, but Prussia was one of the chief beneficiaries of the territorial settlements agreed at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815. In the 1860s, it was Prussia that drove the unification of the German states (excluding Austria) and the foundation of the German Empire of 1871. With the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy in 1918, Prussia survived as one of the Länder (federal states) of the Weimar Republic, but its autonomy was severely curtailed in 1932, when a conservative coup deposed the Prussian administration. The state of Prussia was formally abolished by order of the Allied Control Council in Berlin on 25 February 1947.

from the french revolution to the congress of vienna

Prussian foreign policy during the Revolutionary era was dominated by the quest for territorial gains. Having initially welcomed the news of upheaval in Paris, Prussia joined Austria in invading France in 1792. When the coalition forces were stopped in their tracks at the Battle of Valmy (20 September 1792), however, the Prussians lost interest in fighting France and focused instead on securing territorial gains at Poland's expense. Under the Prusso-Russian agreement known as the Second Partition of Poland (23 January 1793), Prussia annexed the commercially important cities of Danzig and Thorn and a triangle of territory plugging the cleft between Silesia and East Prussia. The Third Partition (agreed between Austria, Russia, and Prussia on 24 October 1795) extinguished what remained of the Polish Commonwealth and brought Berlin a further tranche of territory including the ancient capital of Warsaw. With these gains secured, the Prussians signed the Peace of Basel with the French Directory on 5 April 1795.

Prussia benefited from the territorial restructuring imposed by France on the German lands in 1797–1803, acquiring a brace of secularized bishoprics. In 1806, however, King Frederick William III (r. 1797–1840) allowed himself to be goaded by Napoleon into declaring war on France without first securing the support of another major power. At the Battles of Jena and Auerstedt (14 October 1806), Prussia suffered a shattering defeat. Napoleon imposed a weighty war indemnity and reduced the kingdom to a territorial rump: Brandenburg, Pomerania (excluding the Swedish part), Silesia, and East Prussia, plus the corridor of land that had been acquired by Frederick the Great (r. 1740–1786) in the course of the First Partition of Poland (1772).

In the aftermath of 1806, a new generation of reforming bureaucrats emboldened by the scale of the defeat took the helm and transformed virtually every branch of the Prussian state. The two dominant figures were Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg, both non-Prussians by birth, but the support of the king, Frederick William III, was also crucial. Thematic ministries replaced the chaotic departmental system of the old regime state; new educational institutions were established at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels; the system of subject rural tenures was abolished, so that peasants were transformed from subjects of their noble landlords into "free citizens of the state" (though elements of the old "feudal" system, such as manorial jurisdictions, survived until 1848); restrictions on the purchase and sale of land and on the practice of skilled trades were dismantled. Prussia's Jews, a minority of rightless aliens subject to special levies and restrictions, were emancipated (though the right to occupy public office was as yet withheld). There were also important changes to the structure of the army, including the introduction of a more meritocratic system of promotions, the creation of a citizens' militia to serve alongside units of the line, and the development of a better coordinated and more flexible command structure. Some of these innovations proved immensely influential. Nineteenth-century British and American educators took an interest in Prussia's reformed school system, which produced literacy levels unmatched in most of the Western world. The general staff system pioneered by the military reformers was later widely emulated, and the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität established by Wilhelm von Humboldt in Berlin in 1810 was an influential prototype of the modern humanist university. In contrast, King Frederick William III did not honor his undertaking, reiterated at various points during the struggle against Napoleon, to create a unified territorial assembly. This unredeemed pledge was later a focal point for liberal dissent.

In the Wars of Liberation (1813–1815), the Prussians joined Russia and Austria in ousting Napoleon from Germany. Eager to restore their reputation and earn a generous share of the victors' spoils, the Prussians were the most active and aggressive element within the composite Allied command. In the decisive summer battles of 15–18 June 1815, they played a crucial role, bearing the brunt of the French attack at Ligny on 15 June and arriving at Waterloo on 18 June in time to open up the French rear at Plancenoit and stabilize the Duke of Wellington's crumbling left flank. At the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), Prussia secured the duchy of Posen/Pozna? (though the other Polish lands sequestered in the second and third partitions were lost), the northern half of the kingdom of Saxony, the Swedish-ruled rump of western Pomerania, and a vast tract of Rhenish and Westphalian territory reaching from Hanover in the east to the Netherlands and France in the west.

from restoration to revolution

Throughout this period, Prussia was one of thirty-nine member states of the "German Confederation" (Deutscher Bund), a loose association of independent states with the minimum in central institutions. The Hohenzollern kingdom was now a colossus that stretched across the north of Germany, broken only by one gap, forty kilometers wide at its narrowest point, where the territories of Hanover, Brunswick, and Hesse-Cassel separated the Prussian "Province of Saxony" from the Prussian "Province of Westphalia." The consequences for Prussia's (and Germany's) nineteenth-century political and economic development were momentous.

The Rhineland was destined to become one of the powerhouses of European industrialization and economic growth, a development entirely unfore-seen by the negotiators at Vienna, who assigned little weight to economic factors when they redrew the map of Germany. The divided structure of the new Prussia, with its two large territorial blocks in east and west, meant that Berlin was bound to work toward the political and commercial integration of the German states. Finally, Prussia's massive presence in the Rhineland meant that it carried responsibility for the defense of western Germany against France. The lesser states of the south—Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria—thus tended to look to Berlin for security during the intermittent French invasion panics of the post-Napoleonic era. None of these factors made it inevitable that Prussia would come to dominate a unified Germany, but in combination they tilted the scale in Berlin's favor.

The political leaders in Berlin did not pursue a pro-unification policy as such after 1815, but they consistently sought to extend Prussian influence in Germany and thereby qualify Austria's hegemonic position within the Confederation. The most successful initiative of this kind was the German Customs Union (Zollverein) that came into effect on 1 January 1834. The fruit of years of painstaking Prussian diplomacy, the Union incorporated the majority of Germans outside Austria, which was excluded from membership. The Union did not contribute in any direct sense to German unification—it was never an effective tool for the exercise of Prussian political influence over the lesser states. Nevertheless, it played an important formative role in the evolution of Berlin's "German policy," encouraging ministers and officials to think in an authentically German compass and to combine the pursuit of specifically Prussian benefits with the building of consensus and the mediation of interests among the other German states.

On the domestic political scene, the postwar years brought a conservative crackdown. The Carlsbad Decrees, issued in 1819 after the sensational political assassination by a radical student of the dramatist August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue in Mannheim, imposed stringent censorship and surveillance measures. A number of prominent nationalist and liberal "demagogues" were arrested. The conservatives found it impossible, however, to halt or reverse the processes of change that had gained momentum during the upheavals of the Napoleonic Era. The acquisition of the Rhenish provinces brought an element of turmoil and dissent that altered the kingdom's political chemistry. Censorship proved inadequate in the face of a massive expansion in critical print and utterance. At the heart of liberal dissent was the demand for the parliament and constitution promised in 1815. Religion was another area where dissent and fragmentation were especially pronounced. The acquisition of the Rhenish lands brought a greatly enlarged Catholic minority under the authority of the Protestant administration in Berlin. There was a bitter dispute between the Prussian authorities and the Catholic Church over Catholic-Protestant mixed marriages in 1838–1840 and determined resistance in Silesia to the imposition of a new liturgy for the territorial Protestant church (known as the Church of the Prussian Union). In the 1840s these concerns were amplified by the deepening economic malaise associated with the "Social Question." Food riots multiplied, and in 1844 the brutal suppression by the military of a revolt by weavers in Silesia sent shock waves across the kingdom.

Like most other continental European states, Prussia experienced violent unrest during the revolutions of 1848. The highpoint was reached on the night of 18 March, when over three hundred citizens were killed in clashes with troops in Berlin. The king, Frederick William IV (r. 1840–1861), responded by ordering the army to leave the capital—a highly controversial decision at the time—and expressing his solidarity with the aims of the revolution. Leading liberals were appointed to ministerial posts and the new administration began work on a liberal constitution. The victory of the liberals was short-lived, however. Fighting on the streets continued into the summer, as the liberals attempted to stabilize their gains in the face of calls for a more radical "social" revolution. Collaboration between the monarch and his "March ministers" became increasingly difficult. On 9 November 1848, the national assembly in Berlin was adjourned by order of the king and transferred to the city of Brandenburg, where it was formally dissolved on 5 December. On the same day, in an astute move designed to neutralize opposition, the government announced the promulgation of a new constitution.

Often seen as a failure, the revolution of 1848 in fact produced a new point of departure for Prussia. The kingdom now had a constitution, which would remain in force (with various amendments) until 1918. It also had a territorial legislature. The reform-conservative governments of the 1850s introduced many of the changes the liberals had been calling for since the 1840s, such as the removal of restrictions on banking and investment, the modernization of the tax system, public infrastructural investment, and the abolition of manorial jurisdictions. The 1850s also witnessed a steep rise in industrial investment and production, especially in the Rhineland and the manufacturing zone around Berlin.

german unification

During the upheavals of 1848, the Prussian government made tentative efforts to consolidate Prussian leadership within a more cohesive union of German states. Frederick William IV refused to accept the German national crown offered to him by the Frankfurt Parliament in April 1849. At the same time, however, he supported the creation of a short-lived Prussian-dominated association of twenty-six German states known as the "Erfurt Union" (because deputies elected in the member territories formed a parliament that convened in the city of Erfurt). Russia and France supported Austria in opposing this initiative and the Prussians abandoned the union project in November 1850, promising, in an agreement known as the "Punctation of Olmütz," to work together with the Austrians in rebuilding the German Confederation. For some contemporaries—including Otto von Bismarck—Olmütz brought the realization that the German national question would only be resolved through armed conflict.

The plausibility of this view was reinforced in 1859 by the first Italian War of Unification, when the Piedmontese succeeded (with French help) in defeating the Austrians and uniting most of the Italian peninsula. After a mobilization in the Rhineland (to deter opportunist incursions by Emperor Napoleon III [r. 1852–1871]) revealed inadequacies in the Prussian military establishment, Prince William (standing in as regent for his incapacitated older brother) and the army chiefs Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke and Albrecht Theodor Emil von Roon resolved to launch a program of military reforms. These were opposed by the parliament on financial and constitutional grounds and as the political crisis deepened, Otto von Bismarck was called in as Prussian minister president on 23 September 1862. Having tried without success to divide and win over the opposition, Bismarck opted for a program of head-on confrontation. In February 1864 he took Prussia into war (at Austria's side) against Denmark over Schleswig and Holstein without securing war credits from the parliament.

In the aftermath of the Danish war, Bismarck exploited disagreements over the military occupation of Schleswig and Holstein to engineer a war against Austria and its German allies in the summer of 1866. Prussia's success—sealed at the Battle of Königgrätz/Sadowa on 3 July 1866 and the Peace of Prague on 23 August—was greeted with elation by the Prussian public and did much to mollify the liberal opposition. Prussia annexed Schleswig and Holstein, along with part of Hesse-Darmstadt and the entirety of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, and the city of Frankfurt, all of which had sided with Austria in the war of 1866. The German Confederation was dissolved to make way for the Prussiandominated "North German Confederation," whose parliamentary constitution went into operation on 1 July 1867. Prussia now emerged as the clear victor in the century-long struggle for hegemony in German Europe.

Exactly when and how Bismarck planned to integrate the still-independent southern German states remains controversial. He seems always to have been aware that the threat of war with France would awaken fears of invasion in the south and thereby undermine their objections to union with the north. Tensions with France over a German candidacy for the vacant throne of Spain provided him with the opportunity he needed. Having allowed the resulting crisis to escalate to the point where the French issued a declaration of war (19 July 1870), Bismarck exploited the mood of solidarity generated by a highly successful German campaign to secure first alliances and later treaties of union with the southern states. The new German Empire, incorporating all the German states except Austria, was proclaimed at Versailles on 18 January 1871.

prussia in the german empire

The German imperial constitution of 16 April 1871 was devolved in character. There was no national government and no national army. Sovereignty was vested in the federal council, comprising representatives of the governments of the individual member states. In reality, however, Prussia emerged as the dominant state within the system. It occupied about three-fifths of the empire's territory. Its king, William I (r. 1861–1888), was also the German emperor (r. 1871–1888). Its minister-president, Otto von Bismarck, was also imperial chancellor (even after Bismarck's resignation in 1890, the two offices were generally held by the same man). Its army set the tone for all the military contingents of the empire and the Prussian king was also, in wartime, "supreme warlord" of Germany's armed forces. Yet the lesser states—especially in the south—retained their own courts, parliaments, and administrations and were jealous guardians of their autonomy within the imperial system.

The foundation of the empire transformed the tone of politics within the kingdom of Prussia. During the 1870s, the Bismarck government mounted a campaign of unprecedented scale and radicality against the Catholic Church, which was seen as a supporter of Austria, an opponent of national unity, and an obstacle to further integration. The "struggle of cultures" (Kulturkampf) that resulted merely reinforced the political solidarity of the Catholics. The same can be said for Bismarck's campaign against the Social Democrats in the 1880s, which failed to prevent the movement's spectacular electoral success. Prussian policy vis-à-vis the Polish minority in Posen/Pozna? also changed in conformity with the priorities of the new nation-state, as the administration switched to an abrasive and ultimately futile policy of "Germanization." After 1878, when the liberal majority in the Prussian parliament collapsed, the conservatives succeeded in using Prussia's obsolete three-class franchise to perpetuate their own dominance within the state. Prussia thus became, as Bismarck had intended it should, the "conservative anchor" within the German system.

The relationship between Prussia and the rest of Germany after 1871 was fluid and remains difficult to characterize. The Prussian foreign office, for example, controlled German foreign policy, but after 1890 some of its most important posts were held by Germans from elsewhere in the empire. By 1914 almost one-quarter of officers in the "Prussian" army were non-Prussians. The efforts of the last Prussian king, William II (r. 1888–1918) to integrate the German polity by developing the imperial dimension of the Prussian-German crown met with mixed success. Some Germans regretted the "Prussianization" of the empire. Some Prussians, conversely, regretted the "imperialization" of Prussia and the dilution of the kingdom's traditional values of modesty, austerity, self-discipline, and thrift.

See alsoAustro-Prussian War; Bismarck, Otto von; Concert of Europe; Congress of Vienna; Franco-Prussian War; Frederick William III; Frederick William IV; Germany; Hardenberg, Karl August von; Nationalism; Stein, Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum; William I; William II.

bibliography

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Büsch, Otto, and Wolfgang Neugebauer, eds. Handbuch der preußischen Geschichte. 3 vols. Berlin, 1992–2000.

Clark, Christopher. Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947. London, 2006.

Dwyer, Philip G., ed. Modern Prussian History, 1830–1947. Harlow, U.K, and New York, 2001.

——. The Rise of Prussia, 1700–1830. Harlow, U.K., and New York, 2001.

Feuchtwanger, Edgar J. Prussia: Myth and Reality: The Role of Prussia in German History. Chicago, 1970.

Heinrich, Gerd. Geschichte Preußens: Staat und Dynastie. Berlin, 1984.

Koselleck, Reinhart. Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution: Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und soziale Bewegung von 1791 bis 1848. Stuttgart, Germany, 1967.

Christopher Clark