Absolutism and constitutionalism in agrarian states: Prussia, Austria and East Central Europe

Dresden is one of the most beautiful cities in Germany, now lovingly restored to its ancient glory after the bombing in 1945. Its beauty is largely the work of the Duke Elector Frederick Augustus II who was also king of Poland.

Saxony was one of the richest territories of northern Germany and during Augustus’ reign it would immediately seem to have been the nearest to fill the power vacuum in the area after the Swedish defeat in the Great Nordic War (1700—21). The union with Poland seemed a step in this direction, as did also Augustus’ success in dynastic marriages. In a conversation with his neighbour, Frederick William I of Prussia, notorious for his stinginess and austerity, Augustus is reported to have said: ‘When Your Majesty collects a ducat, you just add it to your treasure, while I prefer to spend it, so that it comes back to me three- fold.’⁷⁴ There may have been something to be said in favour of this argument in the period of Baroque lavishness but in this concrete case, the comparison turned out to Frederick William’s favour. When Augustus died in 1733, he left an enormous debt to his son and successor, whereas Frederick William seven years later left a full treasury and an army of 81,000 men, better trained and equipped than its Saxon counterpart, which only numbered 30,000.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Prussia consisted of three parts, separated by other countries, Brandenburg with the capital, Berlin, in the middle, Cleve, in the west, in Rhineland, and Prussia, in the east. Cleve was the most commercialized part but was small and not particularly wealthy; the two others were both agrarian and relatively poor. Although belonging to the larger German principalities with its ruler, the margrave, having the status of elector, he was the poorest of the four original secular electors. Prussia’s rise to a European great power took place over a span of around 100 years under four rulers, three of whom were great statesmen, namely, Frederick William, called the Great Elector (1640—88), Frederick III (elec­tor, 1688-1701 and king as Frederick I, 1701-13), Frederick William I (1713-40) and Frederick II (1740-86). By contrast, none of their predecessors had been parti­cularly distinguished. Frederick II later described the Great Elector’s predecessor George William (1619-40) as ‘incapable of governing’, whereas a modern historian has commented that his worst defect was not indecision of mind but the absence of any mind to make up.⁷⁵ The Elector himself created the strong Prussian state with permanent taxes, a well-trained standing army and the more or less absolute power of the prince. He also had some military successes, including the victory over the Swedes by Fehrbellin in 1675, and made some conquests of territory, notably that of Eastern Pomerania, which gave access to the sea. However, he had to return Wes­tern Pomerania to Sweden because of Louis XIV’s intervention at the peace con­ference in 1679.

His successor was the least important of the four, but succeeded in gaining the royal title. Frederick William I was a strict, efficient and authoritarian ruler who greatly increased the army, created the system of compulsory conscription (1733) and forced the nobles to become officers.⁷⁶ On his accession to the throne, he drastically reduced the number of courtiers and sold off or gave away most of the jewels, gold and silver, fine wine and beautiful furniture collected by his father.

By contrast, Frederick II was a gambler who fought two prolonged wars against numerically largely superior enemies and won a number of spectacular victories. He also conquered wealthy Silesia and joined the two eastern parts of his kingdom to each other in the first partition of Poland (1772). In contrast to his father, he was a great intellectual, loved arts and music, was a composer and a distinguished writer and a friend of artists and philosophers. He became a symbol of enlightened des­potism, at least to foreign intellectuals, while his subjects might have found that the difference between him and his father was not too great; government and admin­istration continued in much the same way, but Frederick attached greater impor­tance to the general education of his administrators than his father had done. He also distinguished more clearly between himself and the state, regarding himself as the servant of the state and obliged to obey the rules by which it was governed. In particular, he reformed the courts of law and improved the education of judges and judicial personnel. Already at his accession to the throne, he abolished judicial torture. He also reduced the number of crimes to be punished by death and abol­ished the cruellest forms of execution.

He not only conquered new provinces but also tried to govern them in a way that made the conquest acceptable to the population.

Prussia’s success must to a considerable extent be explained by the quality of its rulers until the late eighteenth century — the following ones were not remarkable, but by then, capable ministers, bureaucrats and generals took over. However, the circumstances are also important. Prussia would seem like a combination of Sweden and Denmark. Like Sweden, it was poor and like Denmark, it had suffered in war. It had been torn between the Protestants and the Emperor during the Thirty Years War and had suffered plunder and Swedish occupation. The Great Elector had spent his youth in Holland and wanted to transform his small country without natural borders into a great sea power in the way the Dutch had done. The experience of the Thirty Years War must also have made it somewhat easier to persuade the assembly of the need for a strong army, although this was not achieved without problems.⁷⁷ The Elector Frederick William I combined nego­tiation and bullying for more than 20 years to make the various assemblies grant the sums he demanded for his army and in the end succeeded in breaking their resistance and paving the way for absolute rule and further expansion of the army. Prussia thus becomes the only possible example of Finer’s ‘extraction-coercion cycle’.

However, some doubt has recently been raised about this conclusion. It has been suggested that the real issue between the Elector and the assemblies was religion rather than taxation.⁷⁸ Most of the country was Lutheran, but since 1613, the Elector, later King, had been a Calvinist.

Prussia would seem to be the very opposite of the Dutch Republic, agrarian and hierarchical rather than urban and democratic. As the majority of the population remained Lutheran, it cannot be regarded as an example of a Calvinist country, but it seems likely that Calvinism was of some importance for its political success. Another factor is geopolitics. There was a certain power vacuum in the east after the defeat of the imperial power in 1648, temporarily filled by Sweden, which, however, was vulnerable in the long run, as a small state on the other side of the sea than its German possessions. Another potential rival, Poland, also became more vulnerable from the mid-seventeenth century, partly because of a prolonged civil war, partly because of inefficiency. By modernizing according to the Swedish model, Prussia eventually defeated both these rivals and emerged as a great power in the mid-eighteenth century. In the next phase, however, Prussia underwent largely the same experience as Sweden. It turned out that the country’s financial basis was inadequate and it was defeated by France both in 1795 and 1806.

Together with Denmark, Prussia forms an example of successful absolutism. By contrast, East Central Europe presents examples of failed constitutionalism. Here the aristocracies during the later Middle Ages had reversed the situation described by Otto of Freising in the twelfth century, taking control of much of the local administration and restricting the king’s power. The assemblies were therefore dominated by the nobility. From the point of view of state formation, these assemblies and their privileges can often be regarded as reactionary, preserving the privileges of the most prominent members of the hereditary nobility. Some of the countries in which the nobility had the greatest success in defending its privileges, later succumbed to more efficient neighbours or became dissolved into petty principalities. The Hungarian defeat against the Ottomans at Mohacs in 1526 and the following conquest of most of Hungary have been explained by the weakening of the monarchy after the death of Matthias Corvinus (1490), when the nobility took over the government and neglected the army, but this interpretation has been challenged in recent scholarship. Martyn Rady⁷⁹ has pointed out that the changes after Matthias’ death were largely a natural reaction to his costly policy of conquest which had led to four times higher taxes than previously. Moreover, these changes, including a reduced level of taxation, did not make the country defenceless, nor did they lead to a full control of the country by an exclusive high nobility. The Diet was still active with broad participation by the gentry. The king still had a court of 650 persons and the army that suffered the disastrous defeat at Mohacs in 1526 was large, modern and well-equipped. It must also be admitted that the Ottoman Empire in the early sixteenth century was a formidable adversary which repeatedly defeated large European armies. In a similar way, Bohemia, which had also developed a constitutional government based on the nobility and the bour­geoisie, was defeated when it rebelled against the emperor in 1618—20. Once more, there is doubt about the relative importance of internal and external conditions.

By contrast, Poland presents the main example of a failed constitutional state.⁸⁰ After the union with Lithuania in 1386, the new kingdom was by far the largest in Western Christendom. It covered the whole of present-day Ukraine and reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea and in the east included Belorussia and a part of modern Russia. It goes without saying that such a large and thinly populated area could not form a centralized state.⁸¹ In particular, the eastern areas that had earlier formed the Duchy of Lithuania were dominated by strong chieftains with little respect for the authority of the monarch. Nevertheless, there was little in the history of Poland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to suggest the later fate of the country. Poland had several strong and efficient monarchs during this period. It managed the divisions of the Reformation better than most western countries and stayed out of the Thirty Years War. Culturally, Poland was strongly influenced by the Renaissance and had close contacts with intellectual milieus in Western Europe. It is no coincidence that one of the most important scientific discoveries in the period was made in Poland, namely, the formulation of the heliocentric theory by Copernicus. Although Copernicus had studied in Italy in his youth, he spent the last 40 years of life in Poland, where he developed his theories.⁸²

Traditionally, Poland had a numerous and strong nobility, corresponding to the character of its army, where the cavalry dominated longer than in most other countries. The Diet, the Sejm, dominated by the nobility, traditionally had a strong position in Polish politics. Its basis was the king’s usual need of support for his decisions, which from the early thirteenth century led to the formation of regional assemblies. The principles that no member of the nobility could be arrested with­out legal procedure and of assent as necessary for taxation became law in the fif­teenth century, which increased the importance of the Sejms. In 1468, the regional Sejms decided to join in a national assembly which in 1493 was divided into two chambers, the Senate, consisting of 81 bishops, palatines and castellans (i.e. high nobles) and the ordinary Sejm which consisted of 54 representatives from the lower nobility (szlachta) and the largest cities. From now on, the Sejm demanded influence on the election of kings, even if the new king was the son of the pre­vious one, and posed conditions for the election. In 1569, Poland formally became an elective monarchy. The direct cause of this was the need to preserve the union with Lithuania at a time when strict dynastic succession would have led to different rulers in the two countries, but it was also the expression of a general trend.

The Polish Sejm is best known for its rule of liberum veto, i.e. that one member had the right to veto all the assembly’s decisions. The rule was based on the idea of equality between all nobles, combined with that of representation: an elected member did not speak only for himself but for a larger constituency. The principle was not unknown in other medieval assemblies; it was far from obvious that a majority had the right to bind a minority. However, most other assemblies either developed a rule of majority vote or disappeared. Although the principle of veto existed from early on in Poland, it did not have really serious consequences until the seventeenth century. Earlier, dissenting deputies were often convinced or pressured to withdraw their objections. Moreover, a veto only concerned one particular decision, whereas later, from the mid-seventeenth century, it led to all decisions of a particular session being cancelled. This happened more and more often from the second half of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, when Polish politics was largely controlled by Russia, the veto became an instru­ment to block any Polish attempt at reform. Characteristically, this was a part of Polish liberty the Russians were willing to defend at any price.

A dysfunctional political system forms part of the explanation for Poland’s decline but this system is, on the other hand, largely a symptom of deeper problems. After all, the king and the Sejm had been able to work together reasonably well until the early seventeenth century and even after that, Poland had had strong and efficient rulers.

A Polish noble in the seventeenth century was an impressive figure. Poland was still considered a great power at the time and Polish nobles abroad made sure that nobody forgot it. When Krsysztof Opalinski and his followers entered Paris in 1645 to collect King Wladyslaw IV's bride, Louise Marie de Gonzague, his horses were intentionally loosely shod, so that their solid gold horseshoes dropped off, to the joy of the Parisian people. Polish ambassadors would arrive in foreign capitals with regiments of private troops, dressed in lavish liveries and with horses with gold- embroidered velvet adorned by precious stones. Concerning a Polish embassy to Turkey in 1677, one of the hosts commented that the ambassador had brought too many to sign a peace and too few to fight a war. Inventories from noble families and descriptions of the dress of kings and princes give the same impression: coats and dresses stiff with gold and jewels, large collections of gold and emeralds and surrounded by numerous servants, in addition to private armies. The greater the man, the more people surrounded him.

The seventeenth century was a period of pomp and circumstance all over Europe, but the ostentation was probably greater in Poland than in most other countries. Above all, the contrast between this ostentation and the real wealth of the country was certainly greater than elsewhere. Poland was not a wealthy coun­try in the seventeenth century. The gap between the small minority of great nobles and the rest of the population, including the majority of the nobility, had increased since the previous century. An important factor in this was the increasing economic difference between eastern and western Europe: the expansion of trade and man­ufacture in the west in contrast to the exclusively agrarian economy in the east. Polish grain and other agricultural products, cultivated by poor peasants working for noble landowners, were exported to the west by German or Dutch merchants in return for various luxury and industrial commodities, which meant that the main surplus of the trade went to the west. Most of the land was divided between great landowners with almost absolute power over their peasants. Landownership also became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small elite during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The great landowners wanted as little interference as possible from the king, a purpose that was well served by the need for unanimity in the assembly. A prolonged internal war in the mid-seventeenth century made the situation worse, as did also increasing competition from powerful neighbours, first, Sweden, then Prussia and, finally and most importantly, Russia.

The Polish state was badly equipped for this competition. Like most other countries, its finances were inadequate, but in contrast to them, little attempt was made to improve them. In the first half of the seventeenth century, its revenues were only slightly higher than those of Bavaria, whose size was a fraction of that of Poland, and only one-tenth of those of France, whose revenues were also inade­quate. There was apparently little attempt to increase these revenues, in contrast to the strong pressure of military mobilization on the financial resources of many other countries at the time. One reason for this was that Poland had managed reasonably well in earlier wars. It had suffered some defeats against the Swedes but had had considerable success against the Russians and the Turks. As long as it remained neutral in the Thirty Years War, it had also little to fear from the German Emperor. This situation changed quickly and drastically in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century with the rise of Prussia and Russia as the new great powers and the great Austrian victories over the Turks which made this country more likely to expand towards the north and east.

After a brief revival of Poland’s fortunes under the warrior hero Jan III Sobieski (1674—96), who defeated the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683, decline set in. If we want a particular event as the turning-point, a night in 1698 when two young men sat drinking together suggests itself. The two were Augustus the Strong, Duke Elector of Saxony, newly elected king of Poland, and Tsar Peter I of Russia. Both were tall and strong and known to be able to drink any competitor under the table. The winner of the drinking contest in 1698 is unknown but the political winner eventually turned out to be Tsar Peter. On the morning after the party, the two men agreed on a plan: they would attack Sweden, a country still holding valuable possessions along the south-eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, of interest to both rulers. The moment seemed favourable; King Charles XI had recently died (1697) and been succeeded by his 15-year-old son Charles XII, who seemed an easy victim. In 1699 the two rulers, together with King Frederick IV of Denmark- Norway, declared war on Sweden.⁸³

Charles, however, was no easy mark. He quickly invaded Zealand and forced King Frederick to leave the alliance, after which he inflicted a crushing defeat on the Russians at Narva in November 1700. Then he turned against Poland, which, however, was technically not at war with Sweden; Augustus had declared war as duke of Saxony. Charles did not care about such technicalities; he invaded Poland and replaced Augustus with a native Pole, Stanislaw Leszynski. Then he invaded Saxony and forced Augustus to abdicate as king of Poland. When Charles once more turned against Russia, however, he was defeated in the Battle of Poltava on 8 July 1709, on his way towards Moscow. Sweden never recovered as a great power; its place was taken by Russia. Augustus was reinstated as king of Poland but spent the rest of his reign as a Russian client. He was succeeded by his son Augustus III, who had inherited only one of his father’s qualities, namely, his fondness for drink. He reigned for 30 years, of which he spent only two in Poland. From a Russian point of view, he was the ideal ruler, as he did nothing. The Poles had originally elected Stanislaw Leszynski — the man who had earlier been Charles XII’s candi­date. This led to the War of the Polish Succession in 1733—36, in which Augustus had the support of Austria and Russia and Stanislaw that of France. After two years, France withdrew from the war in return for some concessions from Austria in Italy. Stanislaw was compensated with the Duchy of Lorraine, where the famous Place Stanislas in Nancy commemorates him.

The Russian dominance eventually led to a reaction in Poland, whose elites were increasingly influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Several attempts at political reform were made in the second half of the eighteenth century but all were brought to a halt by Russian intervention. The introduction of a new con­stitution in 1791, inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution, led to interven­tion from the three neighbouring powers which had begun the division of the country in 1772 and ended with the extinction of Poland as a state and the division of its territory between Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795.

Austria or the Habsburg Empire was the largest political unit in Western Christendom and, in addition, highly composite. The term Empire may refer to the hereditary lands the emperor ruled directly as king, prince or with various other titles as well as to the Holy Roman Empire which comprised the whole of Germany and some neighbouring countries. The latter has often been regarded as of limited importance, expressed in the fact that the emperor had little opportunity to intervene in these countries and that their princes might even wage war against him, as during the Thirty Years War and under Fre­derick II of Prussia. However, as the lands the emperor ruled directly by far exceeded those of any of his subordinates, his influence was nevertheless con­siderable and there was also idea of the Empire as a unit above the individual lands, as can be illustrated by the negotiations over the Peace of Westphalia. Moreover, the emperor had considerable success after the end of the Thirty Years War. The last Turkish attack on Vienna was repelled in 1683 and in the following period, the larger part of Hungary, previously occupied by the Turks, was conquered, together with Croatia and parts of Serbia. The attempt by Prince Charles, later the Emperor Charles VI (1711—40), to become king of Spain failed, but resulted in the acquisition of the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium).

Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and the Southern Netherlands had strong assemblies with privileges that were difficult to abolish. With the rise of nationalism and the development of national and increasingly democratic states in the nineteenth century, the Empire was regarded as an anomaly, and in addition as a bastion of political reaction. More recently, with the devel­opment of the European Union, the evaluations have tended to be more positive: the Empire has been regarded as an important experiment in multi- nationality.⁸⁴ Of course, the Empire was not to the same extent an anomaly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when many countries were conglomerates of various territories and only a small minority of the popula­tion was involved in political decisions, whether the country in question was formally absolutist or constitutionalist. Nevertheless, the composite character of the Empire was stronger than elsewhere. After the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War, the majority of its inhabitants were Catholic but there were also Protestant and Orthodox minorities, eventually also Muslim ones. Linguistically, there was great variety. German was the main language of administration but was spoken by only a minority of the inhabitants. Socially and economically, there was a great difference between wealthy and refined cities like Vienna or Prague and the numerous village communities in the Alps and on Balkan.