Frederick William I

King of Prussia (r. 1713-1740)

• Born: August 15, 1688
• Birthplace: Berlin, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: May 31, 1740
• Place of death: Potsdam, Prussia (now in Germany)

Frederick William I was responsible for developing Prussia into a legendary military power. He created the militaristic civil institutions and nationalistic discipline that eventually led to the unification of Germany under Prince Otto von Bismarck and the aggressiveness of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler.

Early Life

Frederick William I, the son and heir of the first king in Prussia, Frederick I, was raised in the strict military environment that was the legacy of his grandfather, Frederick William, the Great Elector, whose policies and successes, from the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 until his death in 1688, ultimately enabled his son Frederick to found Prussia in 1701 as Europe’s first secular military kingdom. Frederick I did not possess the great elector’s military and political genius, but Frederick William’s talents and inclinations resembled his grandfather’s more than his father’s.

As crown prince, Frederick William married his cousin, Sophia Dorothea, daughter of King George I of Great Britain, on November 28, 1706. He fought under John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), relishing his role in Marlborough’s Pyrrhic victory at Malplaquet on September 11, 1709, and seeming to delight in the butchery. Eventually, he would be known as the Soldier King. In 1710, disgusted at the fiscal mismanagement wrought by several of his father’s advisers, notably Augustus Wittgenstein and Johann Kasimir Graf von Wartenberg, and even more disgusted that his father remained blind to their corruption and incompetence, Frederick William preempted the king’s authority to engineer their dismissal. Such unilateral decisiveness characterized his life.

Life’s Work

When Frederick William I ascended the Prussian throne on February 25, 1713, he set as the goal of his monarchy the restoration of Prussia to the power and prestige that Brandenburg had enjoyed under his grandfather. When he became king, the army numbered between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand men, or about 1 percent of the population, and the country was nearly bankrupt. Frederick William was convinced that a renewal of the militaristic policies of the great elector would refill the national coffers and restore national morale.

Where his father had been extravagant and impulsive, Frederick William was frugal and restrained. To bring Prussia out of the financial crisis that his father’s mistakes and inattention had created, he immediately imposed economic austerity on the kingdom and personally shared in the privations that his subjects suffered. He governed as an absolute monarch, imposing his strict Pietist-Calvinist ideals of severity and diligence on the entire citizenry, but he did not “live like a king.” Instead, he shared their burden. Frugal almost to the point of miserliness, Frederick William never wore fine clothes, ate fancy meals, or indulged in frivolous pastimes. He fired so many palace servants that the queen and princesses themselves had to wash the dishes. According to Thomas Carlyle, Frederick William ruled like a drill sergeant.

Frederick William worked assiduously on administration, reform, and especially military matters. He instituted important reforms in agriculture, industry, and commerce, but his main aim was to transform the entire country into an armed camp with the largest and best-trained standing army in Europe. He invented or improved several methods of drill for the Prussian army, and his aide, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau, invented the “goose step” that would become notorious under the Nazis. The king replaced the feudal hierarchy with a military one and changed the system of royal favors from a hereditary or plutocratic basis to a strict meritocracy. This had the advantage of ensuring that the officers of the Prussian army were all supremely qualified by education, character, and discipline, since commissions could no longer be inherited or bought. He made military education readily available to all, even peasants. As he was especially fond of tall soldiers, he paid bonuses and sometimes resorted to subterfuge to enlist tall men.

Among Frederick William’s earliest acts as king was to conspire with Russia against Sweden. The small but strong Prussian army, commanded by Anhalt-Dessau, entered the Great Northern War in 1715 and helped the Danish-Russian-Saxon alliance defeat Sweden at the Battle of Stresow. Frederick William intimidated Charles XII of Sweden enough to gain the city of Stettin in 1715 and most of the province of Pomerania by 1720. This was the only time that Prussian troops took to the battlefield during his reign. He kept out of the other two major European conflicts of his time, the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718-1720) and the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735), but was friendly with the winning side in both cases.

Frederick William was a bully as a boy, and throughout his life he remained mean, bad-tempered, boorish, physically violent, and usually angry. He had no love of art, literature, music, science, intellectual activity, or culture, especially French culture. He expected all of this to be sacrificed for the sake of military greatness. Yet curiously, he was himself a fairly accomplished painter. He suffered from gout, migraine, indigestion, insomnia, heart trouble, depression, and several other chronic ailments. Toward the end of his life, he became overweight and had to use a wheelchair. He seemed to be in constant mental, emotional, and physical pain. He inscribed his famous self-portrait “in tormentis pinxit,” which means “painted in pain” in Latin.

Frederick William’s love of anything military and hatred of almost everything nonmilitary even extended to physical abuse of eminent practitioners of nonmilitary interests, including his own heir, the future Frederick the Great. His cruelty toward his elder son was notorious. He tortured the prince with chokings, kickings, public beatings, humiliations, threats of disinheritance and even execution, and overt preference for his other son, August William. Young Frederick tried to run away three times, but he survived his brutal upbringing to rule Prussia for forty-six years as Frederick the Great.

Even though Frederick William despised nearly everyone, he always dutifully provided for the well-being of all Prussians. The profound mutual hatred between him and his cousin and brother-in-law, George II of Great Britain, influenced the foreign policies of both nations, but the Prussian monarch was able to make an objective decision when necessary.

Significance

Frederick William I did not fight any battles himself as king, but when he died, Prussia was the strongest military power in central Europe. He bequeathed to his son a huge treasury and a mighty army of between eighty-one thousand and eighty-five thousand superbly trained soldiers. The average population of Prussia during his reign was about 2.5 million, and the average size of his standing army was about eighty thousand, just over 3 percent of the population, or about 11 percent of the able-bodied men. His culture of discipline and obedience developed the regimented society that eventually unified Germany and started the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), World War I (1914-1918), and World War II (1939-1945).

Despite his inclinations to the contrary, Frederick the Great maintained the military establishment as his father wished and even developed it further, fighting many battles along the way. The irony is that his father’s army provided Prussia with the security that allowed Frederick to become a major patron of European art and literature.

Bibliography

Büsch, Otto. Military System and Social Life in Old Regime Prussia, 1713-1807: The Beginning of the Social Militarization of Prusso-German Society. Translated by John G. Gagliardo. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997. A political analysis centered on the pervasive military atmosphere in all aspects of Prussian culture.

Carsten, Francis Ludwig. The Origins of Prussia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Explains the origins of the nationalistic and imperialistic attitudes and the political, social, and economic instititions that provided the conditions for the emergence of modern Germany.

Dorwart, Reinhold August. The Administrative Reforms of Frederick William I of Prussia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971. A political history rather than a biography.

Dwyer, Philip G., ed. The Rise of Prussia, 1700-1830. Harlow, England: Longman, 2000. A seamless collection of commissioned chapters by leading historians, explaining and sometimes justifying Frederick William’s reasons for his policies.

Ergang, Robert Reinhold. The Potsdam Führer: Frederick William I, Father of Prussian Militarism. New York: Octagon, 1972. The standard biography.

Feuchtwanger, E. J. Prussia: Myth and Reality: The Role of Prussia in German History. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1970. An evaluation of Prussia’s and early Germany’s role in the geopolitics of Central Europe.

Frey, Linda, and Marsha Frey. Frederick I: The Man and His Times. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Includes a clear account of Frederick William’s life as crown prince.

MacDonogh, Giles. Frederick the Great: A Life in Deed and Letters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Contains stunning stories of Frederick William’s relentless cruelty to his son and heir.

Nelson, Walter Henry. The Soldier Kings: The House of Hohenzollern. New York: Putnam, 1970. The standard history of this royal family.

Oppenheim, Walter. Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns, 1713-1786. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993. Introduction to the diplomatic and military intrigues among the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, Prussia, and the various Protestant German states.

Thadden, Rudolf von. Prussia: The History of a Lost State. Translated by Angi Rutter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. A general but authoritative survey.