364 Chapter 19
him, and considered executing him—became Frederick
“the Great” partly because he inherited the strong state
that his father built. The rise of the Prussian state under
Frederick William derived from several factors: the un-
challenged authority of the monarchy, the subservience
of the aristocracy to a duty called state service, an em-
phasis upon building a strong bureaucracy and the
army officer corps, and the hoarding of resources
through parsimony and the avoidance of war. Frederick
William I, in short, neither admired nor copied western
models of government. He took the concept of com-
pulsory state service by the aristocracy from despotic
Russia. Prussian nobles were expected to serve as army
officers or as civil servants; in return they obtained a
monopoly of many posts and great control over the
peasants on their estates.
Frederick William’s administration of Prussia rested
on more than the domestication of the aristocracy and
the conscription of bureaucrats. He made Prussia a cen-
ter of the study of cameralism (state administration) and
founded university positions in cameral studies. This set
standards of professionalism for civil servants and bred a
bureaucracy admired for its efficiency. What began as a
duty for conscripted aristocrats grew into an honor that
brought distinction. The best indication of Prussian ad-
ministrative efficiency came in state finances. Monarchs
in France, Spain, and Austria faced bankruptcy; Freder-
ick William had inherited nearly empty coffers himself.
But his Ministry of Finance, created in 1713, and its
tax-collecting bureaucracy soon became the envy
of Europe. A study of Frederick William’s finances has
shown that he doubled his revenue while reducing
expenditures—chiefly by cutting the extravagant royal
court that his father had maintained.
King Frederick William I became known as a miser,
but he did not economize on military expenditures. Eu-
ropean armies were changing in the early eighteenth
century; larger armies, maintained in peacetime, were
becoming common. Württemberg had a standing army
of six thousand men in 1700; Poland, an army of twelve
thousand. Saxony and Spain kept peacetime armies of
approximately thirty thousand men. Frederick William
inherited a standing army set at twenty-seven thousand
men and tripled its size to eighty-three thousand. To do
this, he divided Prussia into military districts, assigning
a quota of new soldiers to each; when recruitment fell
short, he added conscription. This meant that Prussia
kept 4 percent of its population in uniform, a number
previously unthinkable. An important element of this
policy, however, was that soldiers be taken from the
lowest levels of society, so that the large army not dis-
rupt the productive classes of peasants and workers.
Criminals and debtors were released from prison to
serve in the army. As Frederick II later explained this
policy, “useful, hardworking people should be guarded
as the apple of one’s eye” because they paid the taxes
that supported the army. The doctrine of state service
gave sons of the aristocracy a monopoly of the ranks in
the officer corps, and this meant that nearly 15 percent
of the aristocracy was serving as army officers. Prussia,
as Voltaire wryly commented, was not so much a coun-
try with an army to defend it, as it was an army with a
country to support it.
Frederick William built the Prussian army upon
such rigid discipline that he became known as “the
sergeant-king” (see illustration 19.5). The Prussian ideal
was an army that gave cadaver obedience—even the
dead would still obey orders. Creating this obedience
went far beyond the famous goose-step drilling of
Prussian soldiers: Flogging and even mutilation were
common punishments. The penalty for desertion was to
have one’s nose and an ear cut off, followed by a life
sentence to slave labor. Nonetheless, desertion re-
mained so common that Prussian army regulations re-
quired the cavalry to surround the infantry during any
march through a wooded area. Capital punishment
could be administered for merely raising a hand against
an officer. This did not mean that Frederick William I
frequently risked the lives of his soldiers. Prussia re-
mained neutral in three major wars during his reign.
When he did choose to fight, against troubled Sweden,
he continued the expansion of Prussia with the acquisi-
tion of West Pomerania.The Prussian Monarchy of Frederick the Great
Frederick William I’s kingdom was inherited by his third
son, the twenty-eight-year-old Frederick II, in 1740.
The new king got absolute power, an enlarged kingdom,
an efficient administration, a full treasury, and a feared
army—the material opportunity to become Frederick
the Great. His life did not begin that way. As a third
son, he had not been expected to reach the throne. As a
son of Frederick William, he had been expected to ac-
cept a rigid education and rigorous military training. In-
stead, Frederick had rebelled against his father at
eighteen; formed an intimate relationship with his tutor,
Lt. Katte; and tried to run off with him. Frederick
William sentenced both men to death for desertion,
forced Frederick to witness the beheading of his lover,
and then imprisoned him with a suspended death sen-
tence. Frederick accepted military training and learned
his lessons well but infuriated his father by deciding that