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FREDERICK II (PRUSSIA) (1712–1786; ruled 1740–1786)

FREDERICK II (PRUSSIA) (1712–1786; ruled 1740–1786), king of Prussia. In 1740 the years of general peace that had prevailed in Europe since the conclusion the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) came to an end. In May 1740 Frederick William I (ruled 1713–1740) died and was succeeded by his son Frederick II (Frederick the Great). In October 1740 Charles VI (ruled 1711–1740) of Austria died unexpectedly and was succeeded by his daughter Maria Theresa (1717–1780) as sovereign of the Austrian lands. The new Prussian king used the opportunity to seize the rich Austrian province of Silesia, beginning the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and the Seven Years' War (1756–1763). Frederick's victories in these wars raised Prussia to the rank of the great power that became, in the next century, the creator of a united Germany.

Frederick brought to his task of expanding and ruling Prussia an unusual temperament. As a youth he was interested in art and music. He played the flute, composed music, and admired the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), whose son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) was the Prussian court composer. Frederick's relationship with his crude martinet of a father alternated between the explosively antagonistic and the coldly distant. But in the end he was his father's son. Flute and composition gave way to success in war and to a religion of the state, with the prince as its first servant. Reason of state became the cynical Frederick's secular creed, to which he consecrated both his life and the lives and fates of his subjects. After the wars Frederick became a misanthrope, nursing an almost pathological suspicion of everyone he knew and every report he read. But in spite of bad health and bad temper, he continued to work, spending endless hours alone reading reports and writing orders and comments, which he interrupted, when he felt up to it, with surprise inspections that terrified superior and subordinate alike. He held his officials to the same standards of diligence and honesty he maintained for himself, and the phrase "to work for the king of Prussia" became an eighteenth-century expression for working long and hard for low pay and no appreciation. But Frederick, the harsh and grim autocrat, saw it all as benefiting the one thing he loved, the Prussian state.

THE WARS

In the autumn of 1740, seizing the moment, Frederick occupied Silesia. After securing it, he offered both payment and alliance to the outraged Maria Theresa, who rejected both and prepared for war. By 1741 all of Europe west of Russia was at war with someone. Although alliances shifted, as did military fortunes, in the War of the Austrian Succession, Prussia held onto Silesia. By the Treaty of Dresden (1745) Prussia retained Silesia, and in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) all other conquests were rescinded. Eight years of war had brought gain to Prussia and substantial destruction to all the rest.

The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle satisfied no one. Austria was not reconciled to the loss of Silesia, and Maria Theresa schemed to get it back. In May 1756 she engineered the Diplomatic Revolution, in which France, after nearly three hundred years of enmity toward Austria, joined Austria and Russia against Prussia. Frederick derisively called the new triple alliance the "petticoat plot," since it was negotiated by Maria Theresa of Austria, Empress Elizabeth (ruled 1741–1762) of Russia, and Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson (Madame de Pompadour; 1721–1764), mistress of Louis XV (ruled 1715–1774), of France. Ridicule, however, was reserved for public consumption; privately Frederick worried about the new coalition sufficiently to begin the war himself in August 1756 by occupying Saxony and seizing its treasury and supplies. When the fighting began, Frederick, for one, would be in a favorable position.

Frederick needed every advantage he could grab, for the alliance was as strong as he had feared. Although Frederick had exceptional military skills and won more battles than he lost, he still could not win every time. He did defeat the French so decisively at Rossbach (1757) and Minden (1759) that they were effectively driven from the war. But Austria and Russia were more substantial foes. By 1759 Frederick had been thrown on the defensive, and in 1760 Austria took Saxony, while the Russians burned Berlin. In 1762, when it looked as if Frederick would lose the war, Empress Elizabeth of Russia died, and her successor Peter III (ruled 1762), who admired Frederick, concluded a peace treaty with him. Austria could not continue the war alone, and on 23 February 1763 signed the Treaty of Hubertusburg with Prussia. Frederick retained Silesia.

Although Frederick was pleased with the acquisition of Silesia and with the rise of Prussia as a great power, he also realized that marauding armies, including his own, had devastated every part of Prussia. Frederick continued expansion after 1763, taking the province of Posen (Poznan) in the first partition of Poland in 1772, but he engaged habitually in a diplomacy of peace, desiring to settle all international issues by negotiation. His attention turned to rebuilding Prussia.

THE SOCIETY

Frederick brought to administration the same ideals that animated his fellow enlightened despots in Austria, Savoy, Tuscany, and Spain. He too strove to increase royal centralization and to impose uniformity upon the varying local and class privileges in Prussia. The technique he used was cameralism, government by committees and councils of administrators. He retained the General Directory established by his father but undercut its broad authority by creating several independent and competing councils, beginning with Commerce and Industry (1741), then War Supplies (1746), Excises and Tolls (1766), Mines (1768), and Forestry (1770). Cameralism fostered reports to the royal autocrat, secrecy in all deliberations and recommendations, and an incurable tendency toward caution and procedure (red tape). But efficiency was not Frederick's goal, autocracy was, and cameralism was well suited to deferring all decisions to the king.

Frederick's internal reforms were centered on three general areas, agriculture, commerce and manufacture, and law. In all of these areas Frederick followed the general ideals of enlightened despotism, the idea that a philosophical autocrat, with the best interests of his or her people at heart, could reform the inherited maze of medieval anomalies, privileges, exemptions, and class structures that stood athwart progress toward a more just, prosperous, and efficient state.

In the area of law Frederick and his successor Frederick William II (ruled 1786–1797) achieved what all other eighteenth-century monarchs, enlightened or not, tried and failed to do. They created a unified law code for the entire realm. In 1781 Frederick issued a general reform of civil procedure. Completed in 1794, this code made Prussian justice the most honest and efficient in Europe, no small achievement, and it guaranteed liberty of religion, again not insignificant. It secured private property but left serfdom untouched. Free persons (excluding serfs, of course) had guaranteed civil rights, but the legal predominance of the landed nobility was also established. It was a code that provided some liberty but with an emphasis on the rights of the state.

Frederick's agricultural policies were a combination of modern state support and retention of serfdom. He drained swamps, particularly in the Oder Valley and in Brandenburg. He settled immigrants on vacant lands that had been depopulated by war or reclaimed from swamps and forests. He gave peasants tax rebates, grain, fodder, animals, and timber to build or rebuild. To the landed nobility, who were the chief support of the Prussian monarchy, he gave money and tax rebates and support for the institution of serfdom. New crops, such as turnips and potatoes, were introduced through royal patronage, along with better cattle and improved crop rotation. In the end, as is so often the case, the nobles with large farms benefited more than did the peasants with small ones.

Frederick's efforts in commerce and manufacturing complemented his agricultural policies and followed the standard mercantilist policies of the eighteenth century. He built canals to connect the Oder and the Elbe, thus opening north central Europe to Prussian products. He expanded the harbor at Szczecin (Stettin) on the Oder to increase north-south trade from Silesia to the Baltic. Frederick invited textile workers from abroad to Prussia, abolished internal tolls to create a free trade area within Prussia, and established a state bank (1766) to extend credit to industrial enterprises. The investment of state funds, a basic mercantilist idea, reached the huge sum of sixty million talers by Frederick's death in 1786. The king also reorganized and rationalized the Prussian tax structure (1776) with the result that royal income rose. Frederick's general economic policies, both in industry and in agriculture, reflected standard Continental opinion concerning royal responsibility for national prosperity.

A general evaluation of the reign of Frederick the Great must center around his greatest concern, the state. Liberty for subjects was not important, nor was anything beyond liberty of religion granted. The state became more efficient, more powerful, and more competitive internationally, reflecting Frederick's mercantilist beliefs as an autocrat and a warrior who made peace rather than war a continuation of policy by other means.

See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748); Elizabeth (Russia); Enlightened Despotism; Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire); Prussia; Serfdom; Seven Years' War (1756–1763).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carsten, F. L. The Origins of Prussia. Oxford, 1954.

Ergang, R. R. The Potsdam Fuehrer: Frederick William I, Father of Prussian Militarism. New York, 1941.

Gooch, G. P. Frederick the Great: The Ruler, the Writer, the Man. New York, 1947.

Rosenberg, Hans. Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660–1815. Cambridge, Mass., 1958.

JAMES D. HARDY, JR.