Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (87 page)

Yet there was no return to the conditions of the pre-March era. Nor should we think of the revolutions as a failure. The Prussian upheavals of 1848 were not, to borrow A. J. P. Taylor’s phrase, ‘a turning point’ where Prussia ‘failed to turn’. They were a watershed between an old world and a new. The decade that began in March 1848 witnessed a profound transformation in political and administrative practices, a ‘revolution in government’.
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The upheaval itself may have ended in failure, marginalization, exile or imprisonment for some of its protagonists, but its momentum communicated itself like a seismic wave to the fabric of the Prussian (and not only the Prussian) administration,
changing structures and ideas, bringing new priorities into government or reorganizing old ones, reframing political debates.

Prussia was now – for the first time in its history – a constitutional state with an elected parliament. This fact in itself created an entirely new point of departure for political developments in the kingdom.
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The Prussian constitution of 1848 was promulgated by the crown, rather than drawn up by an elected assembly. Yet it was popular with the great majority of liberals and of the moderate conservatives.
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The leading liberal newspapers welcomed the constitution and even defended it against its detractors on the left, on the grounds that it incorporated most of what the liberals had demanded and was thus ‘the work of the people’. The fact that the government had broken with liberal principle by issuing it without parliamentary sanction was widely overlooked.
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Over the years that followed, the constitution became ‘a part of Prussian public life’.
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Moreover, the unwillingness of the moderate liberals to risk a return to open confrontation and revolution on the one hand, and the readiness of the government to persevere with a policy of reform on the other, furnished the basis for a governmental coalition of factions that could generally muster a majority in the lower chamber.
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By contrast with the old provincial Estates of the pre-March era, which were dominated by the regional nobilities, the new representative system, centred on the Landtag in Berlin, had the effect of gradually pruning back the political dominance in rural areas of the old landowning class and thereby altered in a lasting way the balance of power within Prussian society.
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This effect was amplified by the Commutation Law of 1850, which completed the work begun by the agrarian reformers of the Napoleonic era and finally eliminated patrimonial jurisdictions in the countryside.
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Otto von Manteuffel, minister-president of Prussia from 1850 until 1858, was thus not wrong in seeing himself as overseeing the advent of a new age for Prussia. The basis for what would later be called the ‘new era’ of liberal resurgence after 1858 could already be discerned within the constitutional system forged by the revolution.

The tone was set after 1848 by a loose post-revolutionary coalition that answered to the aspirations both of the more statist and moderate elements of liberalism and of the more innovative and entrepreneurial elements among the old conservative elites – there were parallels
here with the ‘marriage’ (
connubio
) between right-liberal and reform-conservative interests that dominated the new parliament in post-revolutionary Piedmont and with the trans-partisan coalitions of the
Regeneração
in Portugal and the
Unión Liberal
in Spain.
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This informal coalition was not confined to parliament and the bureaucracy, but also embraced parts of civil society. New channels of communication opened up between the administration and powerful lobby groups of liberal entrepreneurs who found ways of making themselves heard and influencing the formulation of policy. The result was an amalgamation of old and new elites based not on an identity of interest, but on a ‘negotiated settlement’, from which both sides could draw benefits.
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So effective was this new politically and socially composite elite in controlling the middle ground of politics that it successfully marginalized both the democratic left and the old right. The ‘Old Conservatives’ found themselves on the defensive, even at court, where they were outmanoeuvred by those less doctrinaire conservatives who were willing to work within the new political constellation and to orient themselves pragmatically towards the state. It is remarkable how quickly the king himself and many of the conservatives around him came to accept the new constitutional order. The monarch who had once vowed in public that he would never allow a ‘written piece of paper’ to come between his Lord God in heaven and his country, soon made his peace with the new regime, though he continued to look for ways of shoring up his own authority within it. An important figure in the process of conservative accommodation was the new minister-president, Otto von Manteuffel, a sturdy and unexcitable career bureaucrat who took the view that the purpose of government was to mediate between the conflicting interests of the entities that constitute civil society.
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The conservative university professor Friedrich Julius Stahl was another important modernizer; he led the way in reconciling conservative objectives with modern representative politics.

Even Prince William of Prussia, initially a more vehemently conservative figure than Stahl had ever been, was quick to adapt to the demands of the new situation. ‘What is past is past!’ he wrote in a remarkable letter to the Camphausen government only three weeks after the March events. ‘Nothing can be brought back; may every attempt to do so be abandoned!’ It was now the ‘duty of every patriot’ to ‘help build the
new Prussia’.
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The former ‘grape-shot prince’ returned from Britain in the summer of 1848 ready to work within the post-revolutionary order. The politics of the traditional conservatism, with its pious legitimism and its attachment to corporatist structures now appeared narrow, self-interested and retrograde. It was unthinkable, Prussian Minister-President Otto von Manteuffel pointed out to the conservative rural opponents of fiscal reform, that the Prussian state should continue to be run ‘like the landed estate of a nobleman’.
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In their unwillingness to embrace the new order, the exponents of an unreconstructed pre-March conservatism risked acquiring the taint of opposition, or even of treason.

The revolution also placed the Prussian state on a new fiscal footing. Among other things, it enabled the administration to escape from the shackles of Hardenberg’s State Indebtedness Law, which had limited public spending in the Restoration era. As one deputy of the Prussian parliament declared in March 1849, the previous administration had ‘stingily refused’ to provide the sums necessary to develop the country. ‘However,’ he added, ‘we now stand at the government’s side and will always approve the funds required for the promotion of improved transport and for the support of commerce, industry and agriculture…’
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Neither the new income tax introduced in 1851 (whose legitimacy was perceived as deriving from the suffrage) nor the long-awaited reform of the old land tax in 1861, would have been possible before the revolution.
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Flush with new cash, the Prussian administrations of the 1850s could afford a substantial rise in public spending on commercial and infrastructural projects, not only in absolute terms, but also in relation to spending on defence, which had traditionally absorbed the lion’s share of Prussian government budgets.
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The problem of raising a loan for the Eastern Railway, which had forced the government to summon the United Diet in 1847, was solved by the new constitution; 33 million thalers were duly approved for this and two other unfinished arterial lines.
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This unaccustomed liberality was underwritten by a new emphasis on the right and obligation of the state to deploy public funds for the purpose of modernization.
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Such arguments benefited from the congenial climate of contemporary German economic theory, which underwent a reorientation during the middle decades of the nineteenth century away from the stringently anti-statist positions of the German ‘free trade school’ towards the view that the state had certain macro-
economic objectives to fulfil that could not be achieved by individuals or groups within society.
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Closely linked with this holistic view of the state’s economic competence was an insistence upon the need to develop administrative measures in accordance with an over-arching preconceived plan. During the business crisis of 1846–8, some prominent Prussian liberals had called upon the state to take over the administration of the kingdom’s railways and unite them into ‘an organic whole’.
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But it was not until the 1850s that the Prussian finance minister, August von der Heydt, himself a liberal merchant banker from Elberfeld, presided over a gradual ‘nationalization’ of the Prussian railways, motivated by the conviction that only the state was capable of ensuring that the resulting system was rational in terms of the state as a whole – private interests alone would not suffice. In this he was fully supported by the lower house of the new parliament. A parliamentary railways commission formed to advise the government expressed the view that ‘the transfer of all railways to the state’s possession must remain the government’s goal’ and that the authorities must ‘strive to reach it through every means available’.
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On the other hand, the implicit terms of the post-revolutionary settlement also required that the state at times step back and honour the autonomy of the business sector. This is what happened in 1856, when conservatives within the cabinet attempted to put a stop to the proliferation of ‘commandite’ banks in the Kingdom of Prussia. These banks were essentially private investment vehicles used by the business community to bypass the government’s continuing reluctance to charter joint-stock banks. The conservatives (including the king himself) viewed these institutions as dubious French innovations that would encourage high-risk speculations and destabilize the social order. In 1856, therefore, the cabinet drew up a draft decree prohibiting the formation of commandite banks. Manteuffel, who had been approached by leading businessmen, was able to block this initiative and the government gradually relinquished its authority to control the flow of credit to financial institutions. Even in the coal and iron industries, which had traditionally been subject to close government supervision, entrepreneurs were successful in negotiating a loosening of state controls.
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Steps were also taken after 1848 to secure the unity and coherence of the central administration. In 1852, Minister-President Otto von Manteuffel elicited a cabinet order from the king establishing the
minister-president as the sole conduit for formal communications between the ministry and the monarch. This important document signalled an attempt to realize at last the unity of administration that Hardenberg had struggled for in the 1810s, but it was also a reply to the challenge thrown up by the revolution which had pushed the king into the arms of his camarilla and thereby undermined the coherence of the supreme executive. In the short term, the cabinet order did not suffice to eliminate the influence of courtiers, intriguers and favourites. Manteuffel suffered, as all his predecessors had, from the incessant plotting of the ultra-conservatives who clustered around the king. The intriguing reached fever pitch in 1855, when the outbreak of the Crimean War split the political elite into the usual western and eastern factions. The ultras, who favoured an alliance with autocratic Russia against the west, did their utmost to dislodge the king from his commitment to neutrality.

Unsettled by these machinations and uncertain of the king’s confidence in himself, Manteuffel kept abreast of the situation by employing a spy to secure copies of confidential papers from the apartments of key ultras, including the venerable Leopold von Gerlach, still faithfully serving his king as adjutant-general. There was profound embarrassment when the spy in question, a former lieutenant by the name of Carl Techen, was picked up by police and confessed under questioning that he had purchased them on behalf of the minister-president. The embarrassment deepened yet further when one of the stolen letters revealed that Gerlach had himself been employing a spy to watch the king’s brother, Prince William, who was seen as a powerful opponent of a Russian alliance. This ‘Prussian Watergate’
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revealed that the problem of the antechamber of power remained unsolved. The Prussian central executive was still a loose assemblage of lobbies clustered around the king. The cabinet order of 1852 was an important start, nevertheless. In later years under the premiership of the far more ruthless and ambitious Otto von Bismarck, it would provide a mechanism for a concentration of power sufficient to ensure a measure of unity across cabinet and administration.

The years following the revolutions of 1848 also saw a renegotiation of the relationship between government and its public. The revolutions of 1848 triggered a transition towards a more organized, pragmatic and flexible handling of the press than had been the norm in the Restoration era. A central feature of this transition was the abandonment of censor-
ship. Censorship – in the sense of the vetting of printed material for political content prior to publication – had been an important instrument of government power in the Restoration era and the call for its abolition was one of the central themes of liberal and radical dissent before 1848. In the course of the revolutions, censorship regimes across Germany were dismantled and the freedom of the press enshrined in laws and constitutions. To be sure, many of the permissive press laws issued in 1848 did not survive the reimposition of order. On the other hand, this did not imply – in most states – a return to pre-March conditions. In Prussia, as in a number of other German states, the focus of press policy shifted from the cumbersome pre-censorship of printed material to the surveillance of those political groups that produced it. A substantial component of the liberal programme thus survived the déba^cle of the revolution.
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