Frederick II of Prussia was twenty-eight years old when he succeeded to his father's throne on the 31st of May 1740. He was slight, sharp-featured, and a sufferer from chronic indigestion. He preferred to converse in French. He kept a copy of Voltaire's Henriade on his desk. He had spent his entire adult life until that morning being beaten, humiliated, and overworked by a father whose tastes he despised. The court, the army, his sister, his foreign correspondents, and indeed Voltaire himself all assumed that he would now relax — that the army would be cut back, the court reopened to French taste, the philosophers welcomed, the country reset to a more comfortable cruising speed.
What he did instead, on the 16th of December 1740, was invade Silesia.
It was a province of the Habsburg monarchy. It contained over one million people, three hundred thousand of them Protestant, a string of fortified towns, and a substantial textile industry. It bordered Brandenburg on the south. Frederick had a flimsy old Hohenzollern claim to a few districts of it, dating back to a disputed treaty of 1537. He invaded all of it. His pretext was that the new Habsburg empress, Maria Theresa of Austria, who had inherited her father's vast domains the previous month, would never be able to defend a remote German province against a determined neighbour. The pretext, as a piece of political analysis, was correct. As a piece of moral reasoning, it was — and Frederick would later admit it — bare-faced opportunism.
Within eight weeks his army had occupied almost the entire province. Within seventeen months he had defeated two Austrian counter-invasions. By the time peace was signed in July 1742, Silesia was Prussian, and it would remain Prussian for the next two hundred and three years.
What Silesia gave Prussia
The conquest of Silesia is the single decision on which the modern history of Prussia hinges. Without Silesia, Prussia would have remained an unusually well-organised middling German state, dependent on a small population and a thin tax base. With Silesia, it doubled its economic weight overnight. Silesia had coal. Silesia had iron. Silesia had linen weavers. Silesia had a population larger than the East Prussian Duchy's, with twice its tax yield. Silesia gave the Hohenzollern monarchy, for the first time in its history, the resources to act like a great power rather than to merely pretend to be one.
It also, however, made permanent enemies. The Habsburgs would never accept the loss. From 1742 until 1763, and again in the 1770s, and again in the 1850s and 60s in disputes that involved Silesia only as a symbol, Vienna and Berlin would treat each other as the principal threat in their respective security calculations. The conquest of Silesia, in other words, was both the making of Prussia and the seed of the Austro-Prussian struggle that would, a hundred and twenty-five years later, end with Bismarck's chancellorship and the birth of modern Germany.
The Seven Years' War
The reckoning came in 1756. By then Maria Theresa had spent thirteen years preparing for a war of recovery. She had built up the Austrian army from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand. She had made an alliance with her former enemy France, in the so-called Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, leaving Prussia exposed. She had drawn Russia, Sweden, and Saxony into her coalition. The combined population of the powers ranged against Frederick was around ninety million. The population of Prussia was around four million.
Frederick's response, on learning of the coalition, was to invade Saxony pre-emptively in August 1756, before the encirclement could close. It was a calculated act of legal aggression. It also, as he had calculated, gave him an extra year of strategic initiative before the great Russian and French armies could march. He used the year well. By the end of 1757 he had won two of the most famous battles in European military history: Rossbach, against a Franco-Imperial army on the 5th of November, and Leuthen, against an Austrian army on the 5th of December. Each was won by manoeuvre rather than by numbers. Each became, for European officers of the next century, a textbook study.
But Prussia could not win the war by winning battles. The coalition was too large. The Russians could replace their losses; Frederick could not. Each year his army grew thinner. Each year the territory he could hold shrank. By 1760 the Russians had occupied East Prussia, the Austrians had retaken parts of Silesia, and the Russians had briefly occupied Berlin itself. By 1761 Frederick was writing to his sister Wilhelmina, who had been dying for two years in Bayreuth, that he no longer expected to survive the year — and that, if he were captured, she should not believe any report that he had taken his own life, since he had decided not to.
"My situation is desperate. The whole continent is against me. I have lost half my army and three of my best generals. I see no way out except by chance, or by miracle, or by my own death." — Frederick II to Voltaire, 1760
The miracle came. It came in the person of Empress Elizabeth of Russia, who, having been Prussia's most implacable enemy for six years, died on the 5th of January 1762, aged fifty-two, of acute cerebral haemorrhage. Her successor, Peter III, was a Holstein-born prince who had idolised Frederick since childhood. Within weeks of his accession, Peter had withdrawn Russia from the war, returned all conquered Prussian territory, and offered Frederick a defensive alliance. The Austrians, suddenly alone on the eastern front, could not continue. The Treaty of Hubertusburg, signed in February 1763, ended the war on the basis of status quo ante bellum. Prussia kept Silesia. The whole of the great coalition had failed.
Frederick called this the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg. He meant it sincerely. He was, by his own account, in the worst weeks of his life when the news from St Petersburg arrived. He had spent the war ageing visibly. He had spent it writing poetry, reading Marcus Aurelius, and conducting flute concerts in his headquarters tent. He had spent it watching his army die.
The enlightened king
Frederick lived for another twenty-three years after the peace. They were quiet, productive years, in which the country was reconstructed by deliberate state action and the king became, in spite of himself, the first ruler in Europe to be taken seriously as a man of letters.
He rebuilt the depopulated parts of his country by importing colonists — German, Bohemian, Dutch — to drain the great swamps along the Oder, the Warta, and the Netze. He drained, by his own count, a thousand square miles of marsh and turned it into farmland. He invited religious dissenters from anywhere in Europe to settle in his country and practise their faith unmolested. He admitted Jewish merchants to towns from which the guilds had excluded them. He extended toleration to Catholics in Silesia and to Old Lutherans and Mennonites in the east.
He oversaw the codification of Prussian law into a single body of statute — the Allgemeines Landrecht, completed under his successor but written largely during his reign. It abolished judicial torture. It established equality before the law, in theory, for nobles, burghers, and peasants. It was the most progressive legal code in Europe at the time of its publication.
He wrote essays, in French, on the duties of rulers. He wrote a long history of his own reign. He wrote a treatise on military tactics. He wrote bad French verse, of which he was endearingly proud. He kept up correspondences with Voltaire (whom he eventually quarrelled with), with the mathematician Maupertuis (whom he installed at the Berlin Academy), with d'Alembert, and with two-thirds of the leading minds of the European Enlightenment.
And he lived, for almost all of these years, in a small one-storey palace at Potsdam called Sanssouci — without care — that he had designed himself, in collaboration with the architect Knobelsdorff, in 1745. It had ten rooms. It had no queen's apartments, since the king never invited his wife. It had a library, a music room, a study, and a vine-terrace garden that ran down to a fountain. It was the smallest royal residence in Europe and the one its owner loved most. He is buried there, on the terrace, beside his greyhounds. The world calls it Sans Souci. He always wrote it as one word.
The potatoes
The most famous of all Prussian stories about Frederick concerns the introduction of the potato. It is repeated in every guidebook, on every tourist plaque at Sanssouci, and on the cards left by visitors on his tomb, who pile potatoes on the stone each year. The story is that the king, learning that his peasants would not eat the strange new tuber, ordered fields of them planted near royal estates and assigned soldiers to guard them by day — but to leave them unguarded at night, so that local peasants would steal them, taste them, and learn their virtues. The Prussian peasantry, in this version of the story, was tricked into nutritional progress by a benevolent royal stratagem.
It is a wonderful story. It is, almost certainly, not true. There is no contemporary documentation of any such order, no eighteenth-century mention of fields-with-fake-guards, and no peasant testimony about midnight potato-theft. The story appears for the first time, fully formed, in the late nineteenth century, in pious popular histories written for Wilhelmine schoolrooms. It is the kind of story Prussia liked to tell about itself once Prussia had become an idea rather than a country.
What is true is that Frederick issued a series of formal edicts — fifteen of them, between 1746 and 1772 — instructing provincial administrators to encourage potato cultivation, distribute seed potatoes, and provide written instructions on how to plant them. The famine of 1770–72 in central Europe, which killed perhaps a quarter of a million people in Bohemia and Saxony, killed remarkably few in Prussia. The potato was a part of the reason. So was the king's grain reserves policy. So was the army's commissariat, which had been built up over forty years for war and could now be turned, in an emergency, to relief.
The Prussia he left to his nephew in August 1786 had nine million subjects, a hundred and ninety thousand soldiers, fifty million thalers in the treasury, and — for the first time — the reputation of being a great power. It also had Sanssouci, and a flute, and an empty tomb in front of the empty terrace, where the king had asked to be buried without ceremony and was not, until two hundred and five years later, when his bones were finally moved there from a hiding-place in the Hohenzollern castle of Hechingen on the 17th of August 1991.
His successor, Frederick William II, was a competent, fleshy man without strong opinions. He reigned for eleven years. His successor, Frederick William III, was a quiet, indecisive man who reigned for forty-three. He would be on the throne when, on the 14th of October 1806, a French army under Napoleon Bonaparte broke the Prussian army at Jena-Auerstedt and reduced the country, in a single afternoon, to something approaching the condition Frederick the Great had inherited in 1740.
To which we now, regrettably, turn.
End of Chapter VI