Civilization: The West and the Rest (16 page)

While Frederick William unwound with boorish drinking companions at his ‘Tobacco Ministry’, his son sought solace in history, music and philosophy. To his martinet of a father, he was ‘an effeminate boy, who is without a single manly inclination, who cannot ride nor shoot, and who, into the bargain, is dirty in his person, never has his hair cut, and curls it like an idiot’.
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When Frederick was caught attempting to flee Prussia, his father had him imprisoned in Küstrin Castle and forced him to watch the beheading of the friend who had helped plan the escape, Hans Hermann von Katte. His friend’s body and severed head were left lying on the ground outside the Crown Prince’s cell.
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He remained in captivity at Küstrin for two years.

Yet Frederick could not afford to repudiate his father’s passion for the Prussian army. As colonel of the Goltz Regiment (following his release from prison), he sought to hone his military skills. These were to prove indispensable as he strove to compensate for Prussia’s vulnerable geographical position, stretched as it was almost diagonally across Central Europe. In the course of his reign, Frederick increased the size of the army he inherited from 80,000 to 195,000 men, making it Europe’s third largest. Indeed, with one soldier for every twenty-nine subjects, Prussia was in relative terms the most militarized country in the world by the end of Frederick’s reign in 1786.
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And, unlike his father, Frederick was prepared to deploy his army beyond the parade ground in pursuit of new territory. Within months of his accession in 1740, he stunned the continent by invading and seizing the wealthy province of
Silesia from Austria. The sensitive aesthete who had once struggled to remain in the saddle and who preferred the sound of the flute to the click of heels had emerged as an artist in the exercise of power:
der alte Fritz
.

How can one explain this transformation? One clue lies in Frederick’s early work of political philosophy,
The Anti-Machiavel
, one of a number of royal refutations of the Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli’s notoriously cynical user’s manual for rulers,
The Prince
. In his version, Frederick defends the right of a monarch to wage preventive war ‘when the excessive greatness of the greatest powers of Europe seems about to overflow its banks and engulf the world’, in other words to maintain the balance of power, ‘that wise equilibrium by which the superior force of some sovereigns is counterbalanced by the united forces of other powers’: ‘It is … better to engage in an offensive war when one is free to opt between the olive branch and the laurel wreath than to wait until those desperate times when a declaration of war can only momentarily postpone slavery and ruin.’
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Frederick later described neighbouring Poland as ‘an artichoke, ready to be consumed leaf by leaf’ – and consumed it duly was when the country was partitioned between Austria, Prussia and Russia.
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Frederick’s seizure of Silesia was thus no spur-of-the-moment affair. Prussia’s expansion was to be like a mirror image of Ottoman contraction: the achievement of a new kind of power based on ruthless rationalism.

Frederick William I had hoarded money, squeezing every penny out of his extensive Crown lands, and bequeathing his heir a chest of 8 million thalers. His son was determined to put his treasure to use, not only to enlarge his domain but also to give it a capital worthy of a first-ranking kingdom. One of the first grand edifices in what he intended to be a splendid forum in the heart of Berlin was the State Opera. Next to it he built the magnificent St Hedwig’s Cathedral. In the eyes of the incurious modern tourist, these are little different from the opera houses and cathedrals to be seen in other European capitals. But they repay closer scrutiny. Unusually in northern Europe, the Berlin State Opera House was never connected to a royal palace. It existed not for the monarch’s personal pleasure but for the enjoyment of a wider public. Frederick’s cathedral, too, was unusual, as it was a Catholic church in a Lutheran city – built by an agnostic king, not grudgingly at the margins, but at the heart of the city’s grandest
square. The portico of the cathedral is consciously modelled on the Pantheon – the temple to all the gods – of ancient Rome.
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It remains as a monument to Frederick the Great’s religious tolerance.

The liberalism of the decrees issued at Frederick’s accession is startling even today: not only complete religious toleration but also unrestricted press freedom and openness to immigrants. In 1700 almost one in every five Berliners was, in fact, a French Huguenot, living in a French ‘colony’. There were also Salzburg Protestants, Waldensians, Mennonites, Scottish Presbyterians, Jews, Catholics and avowed religious sceptics. ‘Here everyone can seek salvation in the manner that seems best to him,’ declared Frederick, including even Muslims.
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True, Jews and Christians were tolerated in the Ottoman Empire, in the sense that they could live there. But their status was closer to that of the Jews in medieval Europe – confined to specified areas and occupations, and taxed at higher rates.
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Invigorated by the combination of freedom and foreigners, Prussia experienced a cultural boom marked by the founding of new reading societies, discussion groups, bookshops, journals and scientific societies. Though he himself professed to despise the language, preferring to write in French and speak German only to his horse, Frederick’s reign saw a surge of new publications in German. It was under his rule that Immanuel Kant emerged as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the eighteenth century, his
Critique of Pure Reason
(1781) probing the very nature and limitations of human rationality itself. Living and working throughout his life at the Albertina University at Königsberg, Kant was an even more austere figure than his king, taking his daily walk so punctually that locals set their watches by him. It mattered not one whit to Frederick that the great thinker was the grandson of a Scottish saddle-maker. What mattered was the quality of his mind rather than his birth. Nor did it bother Frederick that one of Kant’s intellectual near-equals, Moses Mendelssohn, was a Jew. Christianity, the King remarked sardonically, was ‘stuffed with miracles, contradictions and absurdities, was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the Orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and some imbeciles actually believed it’.
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Here was the very essence of that movement we know as the
Enlightenment, which was in many – though not all – ways an extension of the Scientific Revolution. The differences were twofold. First, the circle of
philosophes
was wider. What was happening in Prussia was happening all over Europe: publishers of books, magazines and newspapers were supplying an enlarged market, thanks to a significant improvement in literacy rates. In France the proportion of men able to sign their own name – a good enough proxy for literacy – rose from 29 per cent in the 1680s to 47 per cent in the 1780s, though the rates for women (from 14 per cent to 27 per cent) remained markedly lower. In Paris by 1789 male literacy was around 90 per cent, female literacy 80 per cent. Competition between Protestant and Catholic institutions as well as increased state provision, high rates of urbanization and improved transportation – all these things together made Europeans better able to read. Nor was the Enlightenment transmitted purely through reading. The public sphere of the eighteenth century also consisted of subscription concerts (like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s in Vienna in 1784), new public theatres and art exhibitions, to say nothing of a complex web of cultural societies and fraternities like the Freemasonic Lodges that proliferated at this time. ‘I write as a citizen of the world,’ enthused the German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller in 1784:

The public now is everything to me – my preoccupation, my sovereign and my friend. Henceforth I belong to it alone. I wish to place myself before this tribunal and no other. It is the only thing I fear and respect. A feeling of greatness comes over me with the idea that the only fetter I wear is the verdict of the world – and that the only throne I shall appeal to is the human soul.
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Second, the principal concern of Enlightenment thinkers was not natural but social science, what the Scottish philosopher David Hume called the ‘science of man’. How scientific the Enlightenment actually was is debatable. Especially in France, empiricism was at a discount. The seventeenth-century scientists had been interested in discovering how the natural world actually was. The eighteenth-century
philosophes
were more concerned to propose how human society might or ought to be. We have already encountered Montesquieu asserting the role of climate in shaping China’s political culture, Quesnay admiring
the primacy of agriculture in Chinese economic policy and Smith arguing that China’s stagnation was due to insufficient foreign trade. Not one of these men had been to China. John Locke and Claude Adrien Helvétius concurred that the human mind was like a blank slate, to be formed by education and experience. But neither had the slightest experimental evidence for this view. This, and much else, was the result of reflection, and a great deal of reading.

Where the Enlightenment scored easy points was in pitting reason against the superstitions associated with religious faith or metaphysics. In heaping scorn on Christianity, Frederick the Great was putting very bluntly what Voltaire, David Hume, Edward Gibbon and others suggested more subtly in their philosophical or historical writings. The Enlightenment was always most effective when it was being ironical – in Gibbon’s breathtaking chapter on early Christianity (volume I, chapter 15 of his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
) or in
Candide
, Voltaire’s devastating mockery of Leibniz’s claim that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.
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Yet perhaps the greatest achievement of the era was Smith’s analysis of the interlocking institutions of civil society (
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
) and the market economy (
The Wealth of Nations
). Significantly, by comparison with much else that was written in the period, both works were firmly rooted in observation of the Scottish bourgeois world Smith inhabited all his life. But where Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ of the market manifestly had to be embedded in a web of customary practice and mutual trust, the more radical Francophone
philosophes
sought to challenge not just established religious institutions but also established political institutions. The Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Social Contract
(1762) cast doubt on the legitimacy of any political system not based on ‘the general will’. Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, questioned the legitimacy of unfree labour in his
Reflections on Negro Slavery
(1781). And if a Prussian king could deride the Christian faith, what was to stop Parisian hacks from heaping opprobrium on their own monarch and his queen? The Enlightenment had a very long tail,
stretching down from the rarefied heights of Kant’s Königsberg to the insalubrious depths of the Parisian gutter, home of such so-called
libelles
as
Le Gazetier Cuirassé
, edited by Charles Théveneau de Morande. Even Voltaire was appalled by the
Gazetier
’s scurrilous attacks on the government, calling it ‘one of those satanic works where everyone from the monarch to the last citizen is insulted with furor’.
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The irony of the Enlightenment’s half-intended revolutionary consequence was that it was itself a highly aristocratic affair. Among its leading lights were the baron de Montesquieu, the marquis de Mirabeau, the marquis de Condorcet and the arch-atheist baron d’Holbach. The lower-born
philosophes
all depended more or less on royal or aristocratic patronage: Voltaire on the marquise de Châtelet, Smith on the Duke of Buccleuch, Friedrich Schiller on the Duke of Württemberg, Denis Diderot on Catherine the Great.

Like other European monarchs, Frederick the Great did more than merely give intellectuals freedom from religious and other constraints. His patronage extended far beyond offering Voltaire a roof over his head at Sanssouci. In June 1740 – impressed by Maupertuis’ vindication of Newton’s hypothesis that the earth was an oblate sphere, somewhat flattened at the two poles – Frederick invited the Frenchman to come to Berlin and help found a Prussian equivalent of the Royal Society. This project suffered a setback when Maupertuis was ignominiously taken prisoner by the Austrians during the first Silesian War, but the project survived.
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In January 1744 Frederick created the Prussian Academy of Science and Belles-Lettres, amalgamating an earlier Royal Academy of Science and a non-governmental Literary Society established the year before, and persuaded Maupertuis to return to Berlin as its president – ‘the finest conquest I have ever made in my life’, as the King put it to Voltaire.
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Frederick was without doubt a serious thinker in his own right. In its insistence on the monarch’s function as a public servant, his
Anti-Machiavel
is a remarkably revolutionary document: