Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

The General Directory, as Frederick found it, contained four departments, but five chief ministers. The fifth, whose functions were the general supervision of justice and of finance, was in Frederick William’s conception a royal spy upon his colleagues. If they were idle, deceitful, or inharmonious, it was his duty to report the facts to the King, “that His Majesty may get no short measure anywhere and may not be tricked.”

It is easy to see that this machine of government, however cumbrous, was admirably designed to serve a despotic king. An army of clerks and inspectors was always at his disposal. If he desired to know what was passing in the furthest corner of his dominions, a curt note of enquiry to the General Directory sufficed to set the machine in motion. The Directory met five times a week, with no vacations. At its bidding, commissioners were appointed by the Provincial Chamber to ascertain the facts. In due course the Chamber received, digested, and annotated their report, and supplied the necessary information to the Directory. There, in the department which presided over the province in question, the papers were again sifted and abstracted.

The Directory could not often be hoodwinked by its subordinates, for Frederick William had furnished it with an army of local spies. Check after check was applied. When the member of the department before whom the affair was brought had satisfied himself, he procured the assent of his colleagues. The department procured the assent of the Directory as a whole. The Directory then reported to the confidential servants of the King. Eventually the most concise and accurate information obtainable, together with a table of arguments for and against a given course of action, was laid before the King by Eichel and his colleagues in the Cabinet. Frederick had only to glance at the paper and scrawl a few words upon it in the morning and in the afternoon to sign a royal order embodying his decision. Then General Directory, Provincial Chamber, Sheriff, and Bailiff set to work in turn to procure the execution of his commands.

It was objected that little Prussia had thirteen or fourteen ministers when France required no more than five. But the multiplication of high officials had this advantage—that it prevented them from leaving the real conduct of affairs in the hands of obscure subordinates. Not only must every State paper be signed by one or more ministers, but every signature implied actual knowledge of its contents. The system, too, prevented the rise of any single man or board that could challenge comparison with the King by reason of its ascendancy in any great function of government. Even Cocceji appeared to the people merely as a royal commissioner appointed to accomplish a definite mission.

Corruption on any great scale was impossible. The public accounts passed under so many eyes that the King of Prussia could never, like Charles VI., be deprived of three-fourths of his revenue before it reached the exchequer. It was useless to bribe Frederick’s ministers to betray him, for they had not the power. They were there to give him information and to obey his behests. He seldom asked them for advice. “Good counsel does not come from a great number,” was his maxim. Newton, he maintained, could not have discovered the law of gravitation if he had been collaborating with Leibnitz and Descartes. As Minerva sprang armed from the head of Jupiter, so must a policy spring from the head of the prince.

Frederick, therefore, admitted no man or body of men as his colleague, in the work of government. The officers of the Directory, Justice, and Foreign Affairs were not allowed to form a conclave which might meddle with questions of general welfare. As a body they were wont to appear before the King only once a year. As individuals they seldom communicated with him save in writing. The ministers of Foreign Affairs had not even the privilege of writing about all of the important matters which fell within the scope of their department. Their master kept the conduct of weighty negotiations within his own Cabinet and corresponded with his ambassadors direct. Eichel was his sole familiar. Secrecy, which the King termed the soul of public business, was thus preserved inviolable. “To pry into my secrets,” he boasted, “they must first corrupt me.”

This is not the place to marshal the disadvantages to the State which the Prussian system of administration involved. At this stage it is sufficient to note that it placed absolute power in Frederick’s hands and that he regarded it as a monument of the highest wisdom. “If you depart from the principles and the system that our father has introduced,” ran his warning to his brother and heir, “you will be the first to suffer by it.”

The ten years of peace were therefore not devoted to structural reform. In the first year of his reign Frederick had created a fifth department of the General Directory. To it he entrusted first the trade and manufactures of the whole kingdom and later the posts and the settlement of immigrants from other lands. In 1746 he established in like manner a sixth department, that of Military Affairs. These changes merely developed the system of Frederick William a little further. By a new departure, however, the Government of Silesia was made independent of the General Directory. For reasons which the King never stated, Münchow became the only minister for the province, and he was responsible to Frederick alone. With this addition the whole framework of government was stereotyped by an ordinance of 1748.

The years 1746–1756 are notable for Frederick’s use of his machine rather than for the changes which he made in it. He now displayed in action the principles of domestic policy which were the fruit of his early training and the guide of his later years. His ideal is as simple to understand as it was difficult to realise in practice. He allowed his subjects to think as they pleased on condition that they acted as he pleased. Neither in home nor in foreign policy did the King recognise any bounds to the assistance that he might demand from the dwellers within his dominions.

The main object of his foreign policy was to extend the borders of Prussia to the utmost limit consistent with the safety of the State. His home policy was to bring within those borders the greatest possible number of men, to prevent them from falling below a certain moderate level of righteousness, comfort, and knowledge, to organise a huge army, to collect a vast revenue, and to enable Prussia as far as possible to supply all the needs of every one of her people. Other states were useful to her because they supplied recruits to her army, teachers for her artisans, and gold and silver in exchange for her surplus manufactures. The gold and silver were drawn into the treasury by taxation and used to build villages, to establish new manufactures, to hire more soldiers, and to fill Frederick’s war-chest. Then, by war or a display of force which made war superfluous, a new province would be joined to Prussia and the routine of development, taxation, armament, and acquisition could begin anew.