FRANCKE'S REFORM VISION

One feature of Pietism that set it apart from earlier Lutheran movements was its expectation that the creation of new institutional forms within the established order would serve as the basis for an all-embracing reform of society. Because “reform” meant the spread of a particular form of piety, the personal religious orientation of the founder of Pietist institutions played a determining role in shaping the character of these organizations. Even though Spener and Francke shared a common spiritual ancestry and were close political allies, Francke's conversion experience and his Promethean emphasis on action resulted in an aggressive militancy that was not present in Spener. Not surprisingly, Francke's Anstalten in Halle displayed greater coherence and tighter discipline than Spener's widely scattered and loosely coordinated network of conventicles. Points of difference between the two men, moreover, went beyond organizational style to include goals and tactics. Spener believed that reform of the Lutheran church would, eventually and in some unspecified way, bring about the desired change in society. The more radical Francke worked for the simultaneous transformation of both the church and the social order. Francke envisioned the Halle Anstalten, therefore, as a model society, complete with institutions for socialization and economic activity, whose expansion would begin a reform of the entire world.

The years immediately after 1700 afforded Francke the opportunity to develop a strategy for accomplishing his mission.

THE COMMON SOLDIERS

Although Frederick William had made most of the day-to-day decisions in his father's government since the coup of December 1710, he did not have the freedom to carry out his own policies until the death of Frederick I in February 1713. When Frederick William I ascended the throne, he was already quite familiar with the inner workings of state institutions and had no doubts about the necessity of completely overhauling them. Frederick had hardly been buried, therefore, when Frederick William began to put his radical plans into effect. In order to increase the overall size of the army while simultaneously eliminating from it men of smaller physical stature, Frederick William I instituted a drastic policy of forced recruitment throughout the kingdom. Impressment gangs seized tall and strong young men from peasant households, merchants’ stores, artisans’ shops, and university lecture halls. Through such arbitrary methods, Frederick William I increased the size of his army by nine thousand men in 1713 alone, and the pace of recruitment slackened only marginally in the next several years.

Assembling this much larger army was only the first step. Frederick William knew that to compete with the still larger armies of Europe's major states his own forces had to be qualitatively superior in discipline, tactical maneuverability, and fire power.

The state-building accomplishments of the sixteenth-century Hohenzollern electors lagged behind those of their counterparts in most of the rest of the Empire. During the era before the Thirty Years’ War, none of the rulers of the Mark Brandenburg was able to counteract socioeconomic trends that in northeastern Germany and Poland worked against political centralization and thereby set this region apart from central, western, and southern Germany. The causal forces behind this regional differentiation are still controversial, but the process had clearly begun by the late fifteenth century with the weakening of the economic and political position of the East Elbian towns vis-à-vis the landed nobility. This deterioration was in marked contrast to the situation in the German lands west of the Elbe River, where the cities and towns retained much, if not all, of their medieval autonomy until at least the 1590s and were therefore well placed to benefit from the economic expansion of the sixteenth century.

In Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Poland, and ducal Prussia, however, this same period of time was characterized by the achievement of an almost total domination of society by the landed nobility. Profiting from rising grain prices and increasing opportunities for raw material exports to Western Europe, the Brandenburg Junkers, like other landowning elites in the Baltic area, were able to use their economic strength to compel the financially strapped central government to do their bidding.

Prussia was in many ways an anomaly among eighteenth-century European states. Though in 1740 it ranked only tenth in land area and thirteenth in population, its army was the fourth largest in Europe and was qualitatively the best. The Prussian state's ability to assemble, drill, and maintain this disproportionately large force was all the more remarkable in view of the backwardness of the economy compared to those of most of its political rivals. Prussia's surprising military prowess was, moreover, only the most obvious manifestation of its unusually effective state institutions. No other polity of the ancien régime had the internal cohesion needed to survive the type of ordeal that Prussia endured during the Seven Years' War (1756–63), when it withstood assaults from the Austrian, French, and Russian armies. This feat shows the extraordinary strength of the Prussian state with particular clarity, since the combined populations of the coalition members fighting Prussia in that war outnumbered the Prussian total by more than fifteen to one.

As Frederick the Great (1740–86) himself observed, during the reign of his father Frederick William I (1713–40) Prussia “became the Sparta [of the North] … our customs no longer resembled those of our ancestors or our neighbors.”

HARMONY AND RECONCILIATION? THE POLICIES OF FREDERICK III (I)

The accession in 1688 of Frederick William's son, Frederick III (I), who reigned until 1713, assured that there would be no radical changes in the Great Elector's policies. Like his father, Frederick not only demonstrated from an early age a strong commitment to the Reformed faith but also experienced a personal sense of election from God that he came to regard as the source of the political triumphs that he was to enjoy in his life. The new elector's allegiance to his confession was likewise made manifest by a series of actions that marked him as a late example of a “Second Reformation” German prince. Viewing the Reformed religion as the “true” form of the Christian religion, Frederick worked to expand the network of Reformed churches and clergy in his lands, took in large numbers of Huguenot and other Calvinist immigrants, and charged his successors to continue his work in this respect. Politically, Frederick as a matter of policy favored persons of Reformed background for positions at court and in his administration. In foreign affairs, Frederick adopted the last policy direction his father had taken, allying firmly and loyally with the Protestant powers, the Dutch Republic and Great Britain, against the persecutor of the Huguenots, Louis XIV.

PROMETHEAN SPIRITUALITY AND THE EMERGENCY OF THE MODERN STATE

The pressure on seventeenth-century European states to increase their military capability resulted largely from the competitive nature of the European state system. The insecurity attendant from the inability of any power to establish a hegemonic position in Europe was particularly acute between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The nearly constant warfare of that period reflected the impact of successive bids to achieve dominance, first by Spain and then by France, as well as the political rivalries and religious tensions generated by the splitting of the Roman church into three major confessions. Still another, at first less obvious source of conflict was the growing international economic rivalry, which increasingly compelled European states to defend with force lucrative assets such as colonies or trading privileges in which they themselves had heavily invested. But despite often spectacular increases in the size of armed forces achieved by seventeenth-century European states, as we have seen in the case of the German princedoms, the states were usually able to acquire the resources to pay for their armaments through an intensification of traditionalistic forms of rule, without having to initiate fundamental social changes within their territories.

THE PIA DESIDERIA

As was the case with the first two decades of the seventeenth century, a growing crisis in international relations and ensuing outbreak of general war contributed heavily to making the period from the late 1660s through the 1680s a time of crisis and change of direction within the Lutheran church. After only about twenty years of comparative peace, the Holy Roman Empire was once again beset by aggressive external enemies and subject to the surge in social misery that accompanied the return of war. Unlike the similarly stressful period at the beginning of the century, however, the general mood among Lutheran clergy and laity in the 1670s and 1680s was not one of apocalyptic expectancy but rather one of seeking to strengthen the church in whatever ways were required to meet the challenges posed by Catholic France and the Muslim Turks.

Indicative of this new willingness to change – and the widespread, popular character of this sentiment – was the veritable explosion of interest in the translated writings of English Puritan authors. Well into the 1660s, the works of only a small number of Puritan writers, no more than a dozen, had been translated. The appearance of many of these editions came about, moreover, as a result of initiatives by church leaders, such as Johann Schmidt of Strasbourg, who made sure in some cases that prior to publication the texts had been “purified” of theological “errors” stemming from the Reformed origin of these works.

Through the process of mobilization just described, the Prussian state between 1713 and 1740 broke through the limits that had prevented any German territorial princedom from acquiring sufficient military and financial strength to challenge the post-1648 supremacy of the Habsburgs within the Empire. By the end of Frederick William I's reign, the Prussian army numbered 83,000 troops in peacetime, approximately double the peak size of the Hohenzollern force that had fought during the War of Spanish Succession with half of its budget funded by foreign subsidies. Frederick William I also left his son meticulously maintained fortresses, well-stocked grain magazines, and a war chest of nearly ten million Taler, which obviated the need for outside assistance for at least the early stages of any prospective war.

This remarkable increase in state power was the result of the establishment by Frederick William I of what a contemporary observer called “a form of government, which was probably ‘till then without example, and perhaps had not existed ‘till then.” What was revolutionary about the Prussian state in the context of the early eighteenth century was, of course, the sudden replacement of the customary system of princely rule through the court by a recognizably modern bureaucratic structure.

PIETISM AND THE HOHENZOLLERN STATE TO 1700

By early 1691 Spener's relationship with the Elector of Saxony had deteriorated so seriously that he left the country. Spener did not remain unemployed for long, however; for in June he received from the Brandenburg-Prussian state a dual appointment as provost at Berlin's St. Nicholas church and as a member of the Lutheran consistory of Brandenburg. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that a working partnership between the Hohenzollern regime and the Pietists followed automatically from Spener's appointment. The Pietists, for their part, initially had reservations about too close an association with the Brandenburg-Prussian state. For one of the most important characteristics of the early Pietist movement was precisely its desire to loosen the bonds between church and state that had tightened during the confessional era. Spontaneous action arising from conventicles within the church would, it was felt, first renew the Lutheran community and then serve as an instrument for social transformation “from below.”

Nor, despite the many political and religious reasons for supporting Pietism, was it by any means assured that the Brandenburg-Prussian state's backing for that movement would long endure. What would always remain a possible source of conflict between the Pietists and the Hohenzollern state were the latter's periodic attempts to pursue a goal first set forth by Frederick III (I): the union of the Lutheran and Reformed faiths.

INTRODUCTION

The story of a revolution always begins with its ancien régime. In the case of the transformation of Prussia under Frederick William I, this procedure is particularly necessary because the revolutionary character of that king's reign is frequently not emphasized by historians. Instead, it is customary to regard the four Hohenzollerns – Frederick William the Great Elector, Frederick III (I), Frederick William I, and Frederick II the Great – as a single group, with each ruler making a greater or lesser contribution to the development of Prussian absolutism. The assumption behind this approach is that the basic framework for what became the eighteenth-century Prussian state was established by the Great Elector in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War and then gradually evolved under his successors until it attained its definitive form under Frederick the Great in the mid-eighteenth century.

This conception of early modern Prussian history has received support from the most ideologically diverse sources. The Prussian Historical School focused its abundant energies on the growth of the key state institutions, most of which, notably the War Commissariat, dated from the Great Elector's reign. Though the innovative character of Frederick William I's kingship was often recognized, especially by Gustav Schmoller, the politically conservative Prussian School's interpretation of the “rise of Prussia” inevitably stressed the formal continuity of the basic state structures.

ECONOMIC GROWTH AND WORLDWIDE MISSION

The nature of the Halle Anstalten's educational program was not without implications for the character of the orphanage complex as an economic unit. The tightly controlled institutional setting not only restricted social communication with the outside world but also tended to limit economic contact. In addition to the attempted supervision of every moment of the children's time, the self-imposed isolation of the orphanage necessitated a planned, largely self-sufficient economy. As Goffman puts it, “to say that inmates of total institutions have their full day scheduled for them is to say that their essential needs will have to be planned for.” In order to minimize both uncertainty in the planning process and possible spiritual contamination, Francke and his associates preferred, in Francke's words, “to carry out all work processes with our own resources to the greatest possible extent.”

Francke's economic objectives were not limited, however, to bolstering internal control through planned self-sufficiency. The “world reform” proclaimed in the “Grosse Aufsatz” required a constantly increasing income for the Anstalten. Francke's attitude toward material wealth was analogous to his views on knowledge and physical health. Neither wealth nor poverty in itself conferred any spiritual advantage; how a person exploited his or her material condition made all the difference.

This book is intended to provide both an explanation for the rapid increase of Prussian power in the early eighteenth century and an analysis of the formation of the Prussian political culture. Accounting for Prussia's ability by 1740 to compete militarily against states with far greater human and financial resources has long been considered one of the classic problems in European historiography. Perhaps an equally compelling justification for writing such a book at this time is, however, the need for a more adequate conceptualization of the broader significance of Frederician Prussia. Prussia's historical connections with the pre-eighteenth-century German past, with the particular path of development pursued in the “West,” with the “German catastrophe,” and with modernity in general – all seem to require further consideration.

The approach taken in this study is to reexamine the origins of the characteristically Prussian institutions and corporate spirit in such a way as to illuminate the nature of precisely these relationships. I shall do so by synthesizing the often told tale of Prussian state building with the story of Lutheran Pietism, a German form of ascetic Protestantism. The resulting stress on the importance of Pietism is not meant, any more than was the case with the Weber thesis, to validate some form of idealist reductionism. The intent is, rather, to bring to the fore a hitherto underestimated cultural factor, without which the Hohenzollerns' administrative initiatives could never have achieved such startling results.

THE PIETY OF CROWN PRINCE FREDERICK WILLIAM

The impressive growth of the Halle Anstalten after 1700 and the sense of solidarity and self-consciousness that developed among the Pietist cadres initiated a new phase in relations between Halle Pietism and the Hohenzollem state. Thanks to its economic strength and worldwide missionary connections, Francke's movement was no longer so dependent on the Brandenburg-Prussian government. Partly because of this increase in the power of Halle Pietism and partly because of circumstantial political factors in Berlin, the nature of the relationship between the Pietists and the state underwent a series of changes between 1700 and 1713. During this period of transition, all the possibilities inherent in the situation were realized. The Pietists contemplated using the state for their own purposes; the Berlin regime took steps to cut the Pietists “down to size,” and the impending ascension to the throne of an intensely religious prince offered the prospect of close collaboration between the two parties. Since this interaction between Pietists and Hohenzollerns took place at a time of acute political instability in Berlin, the final outcome was by no means predetermined. Ultimately, however, the decisive factor was the precise character of the religious convictions of the heir apparent, who in 1713 ascended the throne as Frederick William I.

As we have seen, Francke's strategy for achieving “world reform” developed in the years immediately following 1700.

In 1713 Frederick William I inherited from his father an economic system in which growth was dependent mainly on foreign subsidies for the army and the inflow of skills and capital from religious refugees. Although the Peace of Utrecht (1713) portended an extended period of international stability, the generation of war that preceded it (1688–1713) had left the Prussian state with a valuable asset – an experienced army considerably larger than one would expect from a country of Prussia's size and level of economic development. As an asset, however, this fighting force was highly specific: that is, it possessed a much higher value in its intended use than in other possible uses. With the impending end of English and Dutch subsidy payments, the collapse of the market for the thirty-five thousand man Prussian army seemed inevitable. Frederick I was prepared to accept the loss and cut back the size of his military establishment; but his death in early 1713, occurring shortly before this order would have gone into effect, gave his son the opportunity to maintain the army's size. No one expected Frederick William I to be able to accomplish even this limited aim, though, since it did not seem possible for the Prussian state's finances to pay the army's wages, let alone provide it with food, equipment, and munitions.

Yet Frederick William intended to do precisely that, to purchase the services of his own army and organize the domestic economy around supplying its needs.