366 Chapter 19
“the first servant of the state.” He insisted upon daily
written reports from his ministries and poured over
them in a bureaucratic toil that would have been un-
thinkable for most monarchs. And when Frederick II
decided upon ways to improve his kingdom, he did not
hesitate to act. When he learned of the benefits of the
potato, for example, he forced the nation to adopt it.
He distributed free seed potatoes to the peasants in
1744, then issued an edict demanding that they grow
potatoes or have their ears and nose cut off, and sent
the army to check on crops being grown.
The rebellious and artistic Frederick became Fred-
erick the Great as a soldier. Unlike his father, he was
not reluctant to use the Prussian army. He came to the
throne of Prussia in May 1740, five months before
Maria Theresa inherited the Austrian throne; by De-
cember 1740 they were at war. Of his first twenty-three
years on the throne of Prussia, Frederick was at war
with Austria for fifteen years. He began by ignoring the
Prussian promise of 1726 to honor the Pragmatic Sanc-
tion and invading Silesia in the first of three wars he
would fight with Maria Theresa, sometimes called the
Silesian Wars. Frederick II was neither a brilliant inno-
vator nor a great battlefield strategist, but he was a su-
perb tactician who found ways to defeat larger, or
better placed, armies by concentrating his forces
against a portion of his enemies. His success as a gen-
eral was linked to a strategy of exhaustion in which he
fought in indirect ways (such as occupying territory
and destroying crops or commerce) rather than engag-
ing in grand battles until one side or the other was an-
nihilated. This won Silesia, Frederick’s reputation as a
genius, and international recognition of Prussia as a
great power.
Another part of Frederick II’s reputation rests on his
claim to enlightened despotism alongside Joseph II of
Austria. At the beginning of his reign, Frederick showed
promise of becoming one of the most enlightened
statesmen of the century. Within a few months, he abol-
ished torture in criminal procedures, established free-
dom of religion, granted limited freedom of the press,
and founded the Berlin Academy of Science. That early
promise was poorly fulfilled, however. Frederick re-
mained attached to the ideals of the Enlightenment, in
theory, but his later years saw few reforms and they
were chiefly to improve Prussian finances, curing the
problems he had created himself with long wars.
Frederick II did continue to build the army. Freder-
ick William’s army of eighty-three thousand ap-
proached two hundred thousand near the end of
Frederick II’s reign. He did this by subordinating all
government activity to the military. During a peacetime
buildup in 1752, Frederick gave the army 90 percent of
the Prussian budget. His arms factory at Potsdam man-
ufactured fifteen thousand muskets per year, and the
military warehouses at Berlin and Breslau stored enough
grain to feed sixty thousand soldiers for two years.
Frederick also expanded the army by implementing
the plan of a Prussian civil servant, Justus Moser, for
army reserves. Moser conceived the idea of universal
military training with most citizens remaining active in
a militia in case they were needed.
Frederick’s militarism nearly destroyed Prussia.
During the 1750s, Count Kaunitz engineered a diplo-
matic revolution that allied the Habsburgs with Russia
and England and included promises of the return of
Silesia to Austria. Frederick chose war and kept Silesia,
but following the Seven Years’ War, Prussia was, in the
words of one historian, “a bleeding stump, drained of
vitality.” The war killed more than 10 percent of the
population (500,000 of 4.5 million), and by 1763 boys
of fourteen were being conscripted to fight. More than
one hundred towns and villages had been burnt to the
ground, and thirteen thousand families had lost their
homes. The devastated towns of Prussia included
Berlin, which the Russian army put to the torch in- The overflowing treasury that Frederick II had in-
herited had been squandered on war, forcing Frederick
to face the critical question of eighteenth-century gov-
ernment: taxation. “No government can exist without
taxation,” he wrote. “This money must necessarily be
levied on the people; the grand art consists of levying
so as not to oppress.” He, like his peers, failed at the
“grand art.” Taxes were levied in inverse proportion to
the ability to pay them: The rich and powerful had ex-
emptions from taxation, so the poor and the middling
were expected to carry the burden. That system
worked in comfortable times, but the Seven Years’ War
broke it. Far from paying taxes, much of the population
was near starvation in 1763. The monarch himself, al-
though only fifty-one years old, seemed broken by age:
His back was stooped, his face gaunt, his teeth missing,
and he was plagued with both diarrhea and hemor-
rhoids. He returned to Berlin in military triumph
known as der alte Fritz(Old Fritz)—partly an affectionate
compliment, partly a sad comment. “It is a poor man
who is coming home,” the king acknowledged in 1763.
Little room existed for enlightenment in the despo-
tism of Frederick the Great’s later years. He was still re-
membered as the king who had insisted that “[A]ll
religions must be tolerated,” but he extended few free-
doms. When the German dramatist Gotthold Lessing