1840

Palmerston to a cabinet colleague: 'Sooner or later, the Cossak and the Sepoy, the man from the Baltic and he from the British islands will meet in the centre of Asia. It should be our business to make sure that the meeting is as far off from our Indian possessions as may be convenient.' (The Empire Project, p. 30)

Frederick Wilhelm III died (having promised a constitution), FWIV succeeded. FWIV was a spiritual Romantic seen initially as sympathetic to the national cause and not a reactionary (W Carr). While Frederick the Great, Frederick William II, and Frederick William III had been children of the Enlightenment, Frederick William IV was a child of the Romantic era. He loved romantic novels. He sobbed. Religion was central to his life and politics. His brother, Wilhelm, said he had been captured by 'fanatics' who had been able to 'gain complete control of his entire person and his labile imagination'. He insisted on marrying a Catholic and insisted she could convert in her own time. He loved the medieval 'society of orders'. He 'was steeped in the corporatist ideology of the romantic counter-enlightenment' (Clark). He wanted continuity. He viewed his kingship as more of an older personal relationship between sovereign and people than as head of state. He was not rude about England's constitution. There were concessions to the Poles and a relaxation of censorship. He dismissed an unpopular police chief. However, he soon worried that he had created unrealistic and dangerous expectations from liberals and began to make clear that many of their hopes would not be met. He made clear that he would not grant an 'artificial' constitution and would continue ruling in 'patriarchal' fashion. Leopold von Gerlach worried about the poor coordination of conservatives as liberal pressure built among the educated population — 'the freshly blowing wind of the Zeitgeist ... which, with satanic cleverness, wages an unceasing and systematic war against the authority established by God'. (Clark)

Barclay (FWIV and the Prussian Monarchy): FWIV was an artist and his politics were inseparable from art, aesthetics and religion. Friedrich Meinicke said that he thought of 'the state as a work of art in the highest sense of that word'. He designed the Friedenskirche, the new church at Sanssouci with a 12th Century basilica lifted from Murano. He had a happy childhood and enjoyed his private tutors, including von Savigny (who later served as a minister) who seems to have influenced him towards a vehement rejection of natural law as the basis of public authority. He was fat, short-sighted and not interested in the army. He had an early interest in and talent for drawing and architecture. Like the rest of his family, his life was thrown into turmoil by the defeat at Jena and he had a lifelong hate for Napoleon and 'revolution'. One of his tutors wrote to him (~1811-12) that 'because the state does not consist of a Gothic temple, and because no people has ever been ruled on the basis of Romantic pictures, this perpetual drawing is becoming a pure waste of your precious time.' He travelled with his father 1813-15 across Germany and to France and he fell in love with the Rhineland landscapes and projects such as finishing Cologne Cathedral (begun 1248, untouched since 1560!), bound up with his love for the Holy Roman Empire. His coming of age coincided with the religious renewal in Germany, 'the Awakening', which influenced many aristocratic Germans in hostility towards the Enlightenment and rationalism in politics and religion. He detested the politics of reformers like Hardenberg. (Radowitz was born into a Catholic family of Hungarian origin and married into the Prussian aristocracy, an able man promoted rapidly in the Prussian Army then a tutor in maths and military to FWIII's youngest son which brought him into contact with FWIV from 1824.) His favourite retreat was Charlottenhof, which he co-designed. Barclay describes his view of his role as a desire for a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) and an intense faith in the divinely ordained nature of his rule. He was also the first Prussian king to deliver speeches to the public and he was 'brilliant' at it (Barclay).

Multiple ceremonies in September-October around his coronation. Barclay: he thought that Prussia, which was only recently a monarchy, had no real sacral tradition of kingship and he was trying to create one in a new age in which the old attitudes of Metternich would not suffice. Cf. 9/1842. Barclay: 6 groups vied for influence — cabinet, ministry, court officials, military entourage, royal family, personal friends. FWIV's habits immediately caused tension. Leopold Gerlach once said of him that he acted 'as though royalty were descended from a different Adam' and therefore was 'utterly indifferent to the people who work with him'. Thile complained that the king 'really does make things very difficult when he quarrels with his ministers about whether a village is called Griebau or Griebow.' There was a high turnover of key officials 1840-7 and frequent reorganisations, none of which worked because the king was not a disciplined character and was always casting around for new ideas. His younger brother Prince Carl was susceptible to shady confidence tricksters and got embroiled in various scandals that had to be covered up — and which FWIV feared would be politically serious if, like the Lola Montez scandal in Bavaria, they became public. FWIV played off advisers, hated to push anyone away, encouraged chaos that drove all factions mad. Radowitz said of him that 'he suffers from an inexplicable weakness or lack of clarity regarding people. Thus his judgement depends more on personal likes or dislikes than on objective considerations. Accordingly one finds the most oddly diverse kinds of people among those whom he likes.' Probably at no time after 1806 was Prussia closer to outright personal rule by a monarch than 1840-5. After 1845 the rise of Bodelschwingh and Canitz made it a bit more stable. He embarked on fruitless battles with his own officials and nobility about changes to titles and inheritance. He spent ages on court reorganisations and medieval orders and ceremonies, and ideas about chivalric commitment to higher causes, thinking this would further his ideas about the strengthening of the monarchy. Cf. Barclay Chapter 3-5 for details of 1840-48.

The Rhineland Crisis. Thiers tactlessly suggested the Rhine be restored as France's eastern border which would have meant annexing ~30,000 square kilometres of German land. Crisis passed but it sparked the creation of organisations, festivals etc and did not die out. Siemann (p443): At the height of the crisis Metternich considered a sort of League of Nations as a system of international law to prevent war in Europe. Palmerston was opposed.