Aristocracy: The Constituted Bodies 27
strengthening of aristocratic institutions. The most burgher- like of Prussian kings
was Frederick William I, who ruled for twenty- seven years before 1740. During
his reign there was considerable upward mobility for burgher subjects. Professor
Hans Rosenberg assures us that the ratio of burghers to nobles in certain high
positions, which he finds to have been seven to three in 1737, was thereafter never
matched in Prussia until the Weimar Republic. Frederick II was personally a man
of more aristocratic tastes than his father, and his Silesian wars made it necessary
for him to please the Junker nobles who commanded his army. Nobles therefore
benefited substantially from the reign of the great Frederick. The King strength-
ened their monopoly of rural landownership, ceased to absorb their estates into the
crown domain, encouraged them to set up entails, allowed their local diets to meet,
and took them by preference into his army and civil service. Many Junker families,
including the Bismarcks, became Prussian patriots as late as the reign of Frederick
II, won over by concessions he made to their ideas.
On the other hand the Prussian civil service, one of whose functions had origi-
nally been to watch over noblemen and rustic squires, became increasingly imbued
with their spirit. Burghers in the civil service obtained semi- noble status, such as
exemption from certain taxes and from the jurisdiction of the lower courts. The
civil service even built up its independence against the technically absolute King,
gaining control of its own personnel and promotion policies, setting its own stan-
dards of training and performance, recruiting only “congenial members,” becoming
essentially self- selecting, a “constituted body” in the sense meant in this chapter,
with a strong caste spirit, and an elitist belief in the duty of governing others for
their own good. Independent in practice both of the King and of the public, pos-
sessing a strong sense of group identity and of corporate rights which outsiders did
not share, the civil service in Prussia became a new estate of the realm, and was
recognized as such in the Prussian Law Code of 1791.^6
COUNCILS AND ESTATES OF THE MIDDLE ZONEBetween the eastern monarchies and France there was a broad middle zone, a
world of minuscule states, princely, ecclesiastical, and republican, into which Ger-
many, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands were divided. The old estates of
Denmark- Norway, Bavaria, Piedmont, and Naples (like the Estates General of
France and the estates of Aragon and Portugal) no longer had any meetings. Nev-
ertheless, this middle zone had its social orders and constituted bodies, of which
only a few can be noticed.
The Republic of Venice was one of the wonders of political science, famous for
the ingenuity that had created an immortal frame of government, which was older
than any royal house in Europe. Its citizens, that is, persons qualifying for public
office, were called nobles, and nobility was strictly hereditary, determined by regis-
6 H. Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience; 1660–1816 (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1958), 60–74; A. Goodwin, European Nobility in the 18th Century (London, 1953),
83–101; W. Dorn, “The Prussian Bureaucracy in the 18th Century,” in Political Science Quarterly,
XLVII (1932), 262–66.