Germany 691
“foreigners” (Germans from outside the Prussian dominions) and draw more on
“actual citizens,” wirkliche Bürger des Staates. “An improvement in the soldier’s
inner spirit,” said Lecoq, “is of more real advantage than an increase of numbers.”
Hermann von Boyen, the later reformer, wrote in 1797 that public floggings and
degrading punishments should be abolished. They killed, he said, “a certain self-
feeling which must be considered the source of courage.” Effective discipline must
rest upon the inculcation in the common soldier of a sense of his own honor. All
these were lessons drawn in Prussia from the Revolution. But the necessary build-
ing up of “spirit” was to be done by the authority of the Prussian government itself,
so that no concessions to revolution or to popular clamor need be made. “The salu-
tary revolution which you made from below,” the Prussian minister Struensee re-
marked to a Frenchman in 1799, “will take place gradually here in Prussia. The
king is a democrat in his way; he is working constantly to limit the privileges of
the nobility. In a few years there will be no more privileged classes in Prussia.”^12
Considered a “Jacobin,” and a co- worker of Struensee’s, was none other than the
grandfather of Bismarck, a typical career official named A. L. Mencken. Accompa-
nying the royal party on the military promenade that ended at Valmy, he was
known for French proclivities even then. In 1796, he was commissioned to plan
the organization of the part of Poland taken in the Third Partition. It was a task
looked forward to with satisfaction by liberals in many parts of Germany, for
whom it seemed a good thing for the cowls and cassocks of Warsaw to yield to
the brisk bearers of a Protestant and modern enlightenment. Mencken drew up a
detailed plan, which was said both to embody certain lessons of the French Revo-
lution, and to be usable in a reorganization of the Prussian monarchy as a whole.
Such, however, are the ambiguities of authoritarian revolution that no one can say,
without more knowledge, whether the “Jacobin” Mencken and his grandson, the
“red reactionary,” would have actually differed in very much.^13
Both ideological attitudes and considerations of foreign policy produced in
Germany a strong current of neutralism. It became manifest even in Hanover,
which belonged to the King of England, and where there was an attempt in the
diet of Calenberg to summon a National Assembly of the “Calenberg Nation” to
declare neutrality in the quarrel between George III and the French Republic.^14
Here also, in Northwest Germany, Malmesbury reported “a great Jacobin party” in
- The German diplomatic historian, Bailleu, writing a hundred years later,
concluded that the war of 1792 was the most unpopular war that Prussia had ever
fought.^15 It was widely believed that the war was England’s war, waged by the mod-
ern Carthage to enlarge its control of overseas trade and shipping. Such was the
12 Extracts from various staff studies, either unpublished at the time or published in technical
journals, were printed in M. Jähns, Geschichte der Kriegswissenschaften vornehmlieh in Deutschland, 3
vols. (Munich, 1891); see III, 2127, 2252, 2280. It is curious to find, in 1798, a certain von Ribbentrop
warning against admission of Jews into the army (2253). Struensee’s statement is quoted by Droz,
Allemagne, 109.
13 There is an account of Mencken in the Deutsche Allgemeine Biographie.
14 G. S. Ford, Hanover and Prussia, 1795–1803: A Study in Neutrality (New York, 1903), 46; Droz,
Allemagne, 131. Calenberg was the part of the electorate that included the city of Hanover.
15 P. Bailleu, “König Friedrich Wilhelm II und die Genesis des Friedens von Basel,” in Hist.
Zeitschrift, Vol. 75 (1895), 237–75.