Limitations of Enlightened Despotism 305
The limitations of enlightened despotism are well seen in the famous Prussian
General Code, first promulgated in 1791. Its purpose was to provide a territorially
uniform, orderly, known, and predictable body of laws and procedures for all the
heterogeneous parts of the monarchy. The code was celebrated in its time as one of
the great legal accomplishments for the age, and it gave Prussians a proud sense of
living in a Rechtstaat, or under a government of laws where arbitrary power had no
place. Many Prussians, indeed, after 1789, were inclined to take an indulgent view
of the French Revolution, believing, erroneously, that the French were trying only
to obtain what the more fortunate Prussians already enjoyed. Even Napoleon re-
garded the Prussian code as a precedent when he superintended the codification of
French law in 1804. But where the Code Napoleon came after a great revolution,
and codified the equality of rights, the Code of Frederick the Great—under whom
work on it began, though it was completed under his successor—was a codification
of the aristocratic society, the Ständestaat. It may be taken to represent the farthest
point that enlightened absolutism could reach in a society of legally differentiated
orders.
The Prussian code began with certain general statements, which lend them-
selves to comparison with the almost simultaneous French Declaration of Rights.^34
Neither liberty, nor equality, nor the rights of man were absent from the Prussian
code; but they were quite otherwise defined than in the French declaration.
On natural liberty the Prussian code observed: “The laws and ordinances of the
state should no further restrict the natural liberty and rights of citizens than the
public welfare demands.” In the abstract, this was not very different from the
French declaration. The code acknowledged the rights of man, but with a special
angle: “The rights of man arise from his birth and from his estate.... The particu-
lar rights of a state- member rest upon the personal relationships in which each one
stands toward others or toward the state.” As for equality, the code called for an
equality of obedience: “The laws bind all members of the state without difference
of estate, rank or family.” By equality it also meant an equality among social equals:
“Persons to whom, by their birth, destination in life or principal occupation, equal
rights are ascribed in civil society, make up an estate within the state, einen Stand
des Stoats. Members of each estate have, as such, certain rights and duties.” The
theory of the state was corporatist: “Civil society consists of many small societies
and estates, connected to each other by nature or law or by both together.” Rights
accrued to the individual according to the estate to which he belonged. There were
many such estates, and hundreds of pages of the code were devoted to the particu-
lar rights and duties of each. There were 20 pages on rights and duties of Herrschaft
und Gesinde, that is, of manorial lordship and certain forms of compulsory labor.
There were 50 pages on the Peasant Estate, 100 on the Burgher Estate, only 10 on
the Noble Estate (whose rights were specified elsewhere), 20 on civil servants, 150
on the clergy, 20 on institutions of learning.
34 Allgemeines Gesetzbuch für die preussischen Staaten, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1791). The clauses quoted
above appeared in the Landrecht of 1794 unchanged with one exception: the clause on restriction of
natural liberty was omitted. See Appendix III below.