Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

It would be tedious to recite all the items of the King’s vengeance. His hand fell as heavily upon the provincial court as upon the judges at Berlin. When the Minister of Justice refused to pronounce sentence against them, Frederick himself condemned them to loss of office, a year’s imprisonment, and the payment of all that Arnold had lost. Thus the miller triumphed, though he had in truth suffered no loss of water power. Not till the succeeding reign was his knavery exposed and the royal decree reversed.

These proceedings, which took place in the later years of the reign, serve to show that Frederick was strong enough to trample the law and its ministers underfoot. In general, however, he proved himself practical, impartial, and firm in all that pertained to the judicial system. The story that a miller of Potsdam refused to sell his wind-mill to the King and answered his threats with a reference to the courts, has been destroyed by modern criticism. “The laws must speak and the sovereign be silent,” was, however, one of his maxims. The distrust of lawyers which caused him to prefer the verdict of one colonel to that of many judges did much to inspire the sweeping changes for which the years following the Peace of Dresden are illustrious.

Frederick’s law-reforms were in great part achieved by the aged jurist Cocceji, who, with the King’s support, triumphed over all the interested opposition of lawyers and of his rivals. In the course of the years 1747 and 1748, he abolished superfluous courts, raised the fees for litigation, quickened the procedure, established satisfactory tests for judges and advocates, reduced the numbers of these functionaries, and did away at one stroke with the whole class of solicitors. The violence of these reforms is a fresh proof of the King’s omnipotence. He might by a stroke of the pen have given binding force to the Codex Fridericianus, a famous code of law which Cocceji drew up on principles of his own choosing.

It is evident that in Prussia the judges were forced to be “lions under the throne.” The civil service gave less proof of courage and was equally impotent to oppose the will of the King. Its structure might have been designed for the very purpose of preventing any official save the King from enjoying any substantial power or prominence. The lower agents, who could not be dangerous, had no colleagues, but all the higher functions were performed by boards. The villages were governed by the bailiffs of their lords, and thus a vast number of petty local officers were directly responsible to the representative of the Crown. Above the bailiffs stood the Sheriff (Landrat), who was nominated by the local nobles, but appointed by the King and acted as his factotum. One young Landrat strove to convince Frederick that there were locusts in his country by sending him some live specimens in a box. They escaped in the palace, and the angry King straightway altered the conditions of the office, decreeing that in future no one should be eligible who was under thirty-five years of age.

In the towns royal commissioners were charged with the collection of the “Excise” and with duties of general supervision. But at the next stage collegiate administration begins. Landrat and commissioner alike were responsible to the Provincial Chamber for War and Domains—a body such as that on which Frederick had served while a prisoner at Cüstrin. The individual members of the Chamber served the Crown as inspectors in their province and as special commissioners to carry out the public works which the King constantly initiated. The Chamber as a whole reviewed the work of the lower officials and reported to the General Directory, a clumsy corporation of ministers, which in its turn reported to the King. It is hardly necessary to observe that Frederick conceded to no person or body in this hierarchy the right to stand between himself and any business with which he chose to interfere. He, like his father, often preferred the evidence of his own eyes and of his soldiers to the statements of his civil servants.

The General Directory had been created by Frederick William in 1723.

“We wish,” he frankly stated, “that any odium, however undeserved, should fall not on us ... but on the General-Ober-Finanz-Kriegs-und-Domänen-Directorium [General Supreme Financial War and Domains Directory] or on one or other of the members of the same, unless it shall prove possible to make the public change its bad opinion.”

The members were instructed to give such a turn to the business that this aim might be realised, “because,” as the King expressed it, “we wish to be frugal as regards the love and affection of our subjects and of the friendship of our neighbours.”

The new body, as its name implies, was primarily concerned with finance, which lay at the root of all Prussian government. It was called into being at the moment when Frederick William amalgamated two machines for collecting and expending revenue. It presided over the administration of the old feudal revenue which came from the Domains and over that of the new national revenue which came from the Contribution and Excise,—taxes imposed for the support of the apparatus of war. Foreign affairs and justice, each of which formed the charge of two or three other ministers, lay outside the sphere of the General Directory.

This consisted of four departments, each of which supervised the general administration on one great section of the soil of Prussia. The North-east, the Centre, the West, and the districts lying between the Centre and the West formed four distinct spheres of government, each of which was the special charge of a chief minister and several assistants. To these sectional departments, however, were assigned various minor charges extending over the whole kingdom. Thus the second department, which governed the Electoral Mark and Magdeburg, at one time also fulfilled the functions of commissary-general for all Prussia. It had in addition oversight over questions of salt, millstones, cards, and stamps, in whatever locality they might arise. If the chief of the department had four or five assistants a certain specialisation was possible, but he was obliged to reckon with the contingency that one or more of them might be commissioned to spend part of their time in another department.