690 Chapter XXIX
lightened and a more backward part of Europe or the world. No treason was in-
volved; there was no German national state for them to be traitors to—or citizens
of. For the same reason—the existence of hundreds of jurisdictions unrelated ex-
cept by the ritual of the Holy Empire—there was no arena or forum of collective
public action in Germany. In addition, neither the nobleman nor the peasant
would work with the burgher, nor he with them. The Weltbürger, however excited,
was condemned to inaction. His “revolution” was in the mind.
In Prussia the situation was somewhat different because of the prestige of the
monarchy. Not typical of Germany as a whole, with a few duchies near the Dutch
border but most of its territories lying east of the Elbe (in what are now East Ger-
many and Poland), Prussia was the largest German state other than Austria. Its
burghers, in Berlin, Königsberg, and elsewhere, had become rather class- conscious
with respect to the agrarian and military Junker nobility, but their confidence in
the monarchy remained firm. A codification of Prussian law, made public in 1791,
was finally promulgated in 1794. The code in fact sanctioned the separation of
legal classes in the Ständestaat, recognizing a different and unequal status in no-
bles, burghers, and peasants, and so was in fact contrary to everything in the
French Revolution from the Declaration of 1789 to the Code Napoleon of 1804.^10
It was, however, a code—regular, known, predictable, well administered, and, on its
own premises, intended to be just. The Prussians took pride in living in a Rechtstaat,
or state of law.
Sympathy with the French Revolution was widespread in Prussia. The common
belief, however, was that the French were only struggling to obtain what the Prus-
sians already enjoyed, and that certainly no popular disturbance was necessary in
Prussia, where the monarchy itself would confer all the benefits at which revolu-
tion, all too fruitlessly, aimed. Nor was the belief without a tincture of evidence to
sustain it. “Jacobins,” that is, persons who disapproved of the war with France, or
who favored some extension and equalization of civil rights in Prussia, were fairly
numerous even in the upper classes. Most exalted among them was Prince Henry,
the king’s uncle and brother of Frederick the Great. In the Prussian officer corps
the British diplomat, Lord Malmesbury, found “a strong taint of democracy,” by
which he must have meant a reluctance to accept the foreign policy of Great
Britain.^11
There were in fact new stirrings in Prussia, especially after Frederick William
III became king in 1797. Serfdom was ended on the crown domain. Studies were
made in the General Staff, signalizing the need of reforms which were not insti-
tuted until after the collapse of the army at Jena almost ten years later. Thus an of-
ficer named Behrenhorst, in 1797, pointing to American, Dutch, and French ex-
amples, found that peoples made better soldiers when they felt a positive emotional
attachment to their political constitution. A Lieutenant Colonel Karl Ludwig
Lecoq proposed that the officer ranks be opened to men of the educated middle
classes, and that, for the enlisted ranks, Prussia should cease to rely so much upon
10 For the text of parts of the Prussian code see 802–5.
11 Malmesbury to Grenville, Oct. 21, 1794, in Diaries and Correspondence, 4 vols. (London, 1845),
III, 137–39.