Strains on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence 155
the leap to great-power status came only when Frederick the Great (r.
1740–86) seized the province of Silesia from Austria and made good
his usurpation in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740—48).^11
The disturbances to older balances of power within Europe which
frontier expansion thus provoked were registered in the diplomatic
revolution that preceded the Seven Years War (1756–63). The rivalry
between the Hapsburg and French monarchies, which dated back to
their quarrels over the Burgundian inheritance (1477) and around
which the rivalries of lesser European states had long revolved, was
replaced after 1756 by half-hearted cooperation between France and
Austria aimed against their increasingly formidable respective
rivals—Great Britain and Prussia. Yet despite the apparent magnitude
of French and Austrian resources, it was the British and the Prussians
who won the war. Great Britain’s victories overseas drove the French
from Canada and all but eliminated them from India as well. Recovery
of French naval power, though real enough by 1788, did not suffice to
repair the setback to French commerce that the defeats of 1754–63
had wrought.
Prussia’s survival against the assault of the Austrian, French, and
Russian armies was a tribute to the efficiency of Prussian drillmasters,
to the morale of the Prussian officer corps, and to Frederick IPs per
sonal abilities as a general. Yet it is also the case that cracks in the
alliance were what allowed Prussia to survive. In particular the with
drawal of Russian forces from the war when a new tsar, Peter III, came
to the throne in 1762 gave Frederick a breathing space he desperately
needed; and in the next year, their ill success against Great Britain
persuaded the French to withdraw from the war, thus compelling the
Austrians also to make peace (1763).
Prussia’s military reputation rose to a pinnacle on the strength of
Frederick’s remarkable survival against what had appeared to be
overwhelming odds. This did much to disguise from contemporaries
the pivotal reality of eastern Europe, to wit, the rise of Russian power.
Events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have likewise made
Prussian (later German) history seem central to the history of Europe
as a whole. Yet one can argue very plausibly that Russia was the state
that profited most from Frederick’s aggressive policies. (He had pre
cipitated war in 1740 and again in 1756 by invading Hapsburg lands.)
The ill-feeling that divided Austria from Prussia after 1740 meant that
cooperation between those two states became next to impossible.
- Cf. Otto Büsch, Mihtarsystem unci Sozialleben im alten Preussen (Berlin, 1962), pp.
77–99 and passim; Herbert Rosinski, The German Army (New York, 1966), pp. 21–26.
