When Frederick William II ascended to the Prussian throne in 1786, one of his first legislative acts was a reform of the loathed urban excise tax. He removed leading officials, changed excise tariffs for many products, and issued orders to relax often intrusive controls. This reversal of fiscal policy was a remarkable victory for Prussia's burghers who had vigorously resisted the tax since Frederick II had, in 1766, created a whole new excise administration – known as the Régie – to extract more revenue from Prussia's towns. In many ways, the successful resistance of taxpayers places Prussia in a context of ‘normality’ of conflicts over taxation that swept the Atlantic world in this period, although Berlin in 1787 was certainly not Boston in 1773 or Paris in 1789. There was no tea party in Emden and no assault on the Citadel in Spandau. But the events of 1787 still mark a significant shift in relations between the state and inhabitants of cities and towns. Historians have often depicted Prussia's burghers as downtrodden and desolate cousins of the bold and self-reliant bourgeoisies of the Atlantic world.Footnote 1 By contrast, in this instance, they can be seen prevailing in a political conflict that lasted over twenty years and pitted them against an absolutist monarchical state.
This success is all the more remarkable because of the high fiscal stakes for the Prussian state and great number of tax payers involved. Indirect taxes – including, most prominently, customs and excise – were the Prussian state's fastest growing source of revenue and became the most important form of taxation in this period. Revenues from excise and customs accounted for 35 per cent of tax revenue in 1740; in 1786 this share had nearly doubled to 60 per cent.Footnote 2 This was not as high as Britain where customs and excises comprised more than 80 per cent of tax revenue, but it was higher than France where they represented roughly half. The taxes that were at the heart of this conflict were thus clearly a central part of the ‘sinews of power’ of the Prussian state, although it must be remembered that, unlike Britain and France, Prussia still derived just under half of its state revenue from domains, regalia, and similar sources that were not based on taxation.Footnote 3 The conflict, however, not only involved significant amounts of money, but also a large share of the Prussian population. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to know the distribution of Prussia's population in this period with any precision, but the best available statistics suggest that approximately 28 per cent of Prussia's population lived in the towns and were thus, in principle, subject to the excise.Footnote 4 The real number may well be higher because contemporary statistics normally excluded the often significant military population in towns.Footnote 5 While the number of urban dwellers can only be taken as a rough approximation of the number of tax payers subject to indirect taxes,Footnote 6 they draw attention to the fact that, in Gustav Schmoller's words, ‘the Prussian state of the [eighteenth] century was not an agrarian state without towns … and that in several territories the urban element already accounted for more than a third of the population’.Footnote 7
This article thus sheds light on a ‘world that is often overlooked in general accounts of the Prussian lands’ by exploring an example of the active and independent political role played by inhabitants of cities and towns in the Hohenzollern polity.Footnote 8 In particular, this study explores motives that led taxpayers from Kleve to Königsberg to resist the Régie, as well as the tactics used to oppose and resist the fiscal appetite of the growing Prussian state. Three forms of resistance can be reconstructed. From the beginning of the institution of the Régie, all manners of petitions and complaints emerged about the new administration, mostly directed to the local branches of the established administration, the Kriegs- und Domänenkammern, which reported them to the central administration of the Generaldirektorium and to the king himself. Equally, from the time of the administration's creation, but with a strongly increasing tendency, the Régie was faced with acts of resistance such as smuggling and attacks on tax officials. Finally, from the 1770s onwards and most intensely around the time of the Régie's abolition, the conflict became the subject of letters, pamphlets, and books.
The wide variety of forms of opposition makes the conflict particularly interesting, but also more difficult to write its history. Should these different types of responses – often adopted by tax-payers in different cities of a polity with an extremely fragmented geography – be treated as a unified movement? Should acts of resistance be distinguished from verbally expressed opposition? And should the latter be treated as one when publicly voiced critique differs in important ways from that expressed in petitions and complaints to officials? Such questions were also asked by contemporaries. In What is enlightenment? (1784), Immanuel Kant famously argued that it was acceptable to complain about taxes so long as one kept paying them. Printed commentary on taxation was even part of the commendable ‘public use of reason’ that was bound to promote the progress of enlightenment. In this way, Kant distinguished between the social utility of different responses to fiscal conflict, but also acknowledged their inherent connection. Disobedience and reasoning were both possible reactions to fiscal conflict and both could be observed in Königsberg whilst Kant was writing. Kant's arguments sought to convince fellow Prussians that reasoning was the ‘enlightening’ reaction to grievances and to alleviate official fears that freedom of thought was inherently associated with subversion or rebellion.
The underlying conflict emerges as the unifying element of disparate forms of fiscal resistance. The merchant who petitioned, the consumer who purchased contraband, the victualler who shot tax officials, and the scribbler who assailed the excise in pamphlets may have opposed the Régie in different ways, but were united in their outrage at a fiscal regime they regarded as illegitimate. Responding to the same problems faced in their daily lives, there is considerable agreement amongst taxpayers about what was wrong with the Régie. Perhaps surprisingly, it was not primarily an increased fiscal burden that prompted protests. Instead, the intrusiveness and a lack of respect by the Régie officials were the issues cited most frequently in complaints, publications, and even in Frederick William's reform edict. Ingrid Mittenzwei points to the ‘bureaucratization’ that was associated with the introduction of the Régie as one of the main sources of discontent, with merchants in particular perceiving the new formalities as vexing and oppressive.Footnote 9
Common grievances were not the only connection among the different manifestations of fiscal protest; written forms of protests often referred to acts of resistance. Pamphlets and merchant's complaints frequently referred to problems of contraband and violence that they blamed on the Régie. Non-verbal forms of opposition thus served as arguments for those writing against the excise. This is hardly surprising since many who complained had, in one way or another, first-hand experience with its problems either as merchants, artisans, consumers, or tax officials. Shared experience was facilitated by spatial proximity. The excise and its discontents were strictly urban phenomena and the comparably small size of Prussia's cities and towns facilitated the exchanges about negative experiences with the Régie. Different types of protests against the Régie did not amount to anything resembling an organized movement, but those who opposed it were still connected by a ‘common enemy’, shared experiences, and an awareness of each others' efforts.
Prussia's geography equally worked as a divisive factor. The locations and histories of different towns and cities were as diverse as the forms of fiscal resistance. Towns varied in size, legal status, and the socio-economic and religious composition of their populations. Some had been part of the Hohenzollern's dominions for centuries whilst others – notably the towns of Silesia – had been acquired only in the 1740s. Whilst constraints of space preclude a full account of this diversity, there were powerful tendencies that make this neglect acceptable. All Prussian towns shared the experience of a dramatic decline in urban political autonomy. Since the end of the Thirty Years' War, the Hohenzollern's efforts to establish a more powerful central state had been felt most strongly by towns increasingly governed by representatives of the central state. The lack of political institutions representing the political interests of the urban populations played an important part in provoking public debates about the excise. Moreover, the Régie was a common experience of Prussia's towns, at least of those ‘exciseable towns’ examined in this inquiry. It was the first time that a centrally run fiscal administration was present in almost all Prussian provinces. In a process reminiscent of Alexis de Tocqueville's description of the effects of administrative centralization under the ancien régime in France, the Régie placed in direct contact, and subsequently direct conflict, the urban populations of Prussia and the administrative organs of the growing central state.
In what follows, the opposition against the Régie is primarily understood as a rebellion of taxpayers against the state's intrusions into their homes, workshops, carts, and freedom to make choices about their consumption habits. Closely related was resistance against the excise's financial burden which was seen as threatening the prosperity of individual economic activities, families, whole branches of economic activity, and entire towns. An argument of this kind, particularly the extent to which this conflict generated public debates, makes it necessary to engage with one of the most enduringly controversial historiographical debates of recent times. Ever since Jürgen Habermas published Structural transformation of the public sphere (1962), historians have fiercely contested and, probably less often, defended Habermas's arguments. A recent survey of the debate counted over 12,000 scholarly articles concerning this debate.Footnote 10 Three aspects are particularly pertinent and should at least be addressed briefly.
Initially, we must defend our argument against Habermas himself. A central part of Habermas's original thesis was to contrast the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere in France and England with the lack of a similar development in Germany. Since Prussia's bourgeoisie was too weak to challenge royal authority, the public debates of the Prussian Enlightenment remained unpolitical and largely concerned with literary criticism and moral introspection. While the historiographical notion of a retarded socio-economic development of Prussia's middle class still lingers, the depiction of Prussia's Enlightenment culture has been successfully challenged. As elsewhere in Europe, Eckhart Hellmuth observed, ‘the educated strata of society sought to affirm not only a cultural, but increasingly also a political identity’.Footnote 11 Exploration of Frederick's excise reform and its resulting discontents contributes to this emerging picture of a politicized and reform-oriented Prussian public by suggesting that fiscal reform was a central concern for public commentators. Surprisingly, fiscal debates have not been systematically examined in the Prussian case, although similar controversies feature prominently in research about public debates elsewhere in Europe and the Atlantic world. This article seeks to reduce this historiographical gap, although direct taxation and the related debates are not considered due to space restrictions.Footnote 12 Whilst Habermas painted a misleading picture of the Prussian Enlightenment, as a hermeneutical tool, his theory remains relevant. The paradigm is well suited to understanding relations between fiscal conflicts and associated debates, as Michael Kwass has demonstrated in his outstanding study of the fiscal history of France in the eighteenth-century ancien régime which convincingly combines forensic examination of sources with a Habermasian interpretative framework.Footnote 13
Penetrating criticism has, however, also been levelled against the theoretical core of Habermas's argument, particularly the central link between socio-economic change and intellectual development. The debate has mainly revolved around the label ‘bourgeois’ that Habermas affixed to the ‘public sphere’. Rather oddly, all participants in the controversy agree with Habermas on the social composition of the public: while the public sphere was in principle open to all (educated) individuals, ‘officials of the rulers' administrations were its core’.Footnote 14 But controversy has raged over whether the ideologically charged term ‘bourgeois’ could be used for such individuals. Habermas called them ‘bürgerlich’; some of his critics agreed but insisted that they were of a type of bourgeois that was ‘nothing to do with capitalism’,Footnote 15 whilst others denied that they were bourgeois at all.Footnote 16 Debates about the excise examined here do not clarify, but complicate, this discussion. Those dubious of the ‘bourgeois’ nature of the public sphere contended that members of the public on the state's pay roll could not be considered bourgeois and were instead evidence of the Prussian Enlightenment's ‘proximity to the state’.Footnote 17 This argument is problematic, however, not only because of methodological issues arising from the use of statistical information in the underpinning studies, but also because of the complex construction of contemporary social and intellectual identities. In this article, for instance, we encounter Georg Friedrich Hamann, son of a barber surgeon, who, for lack of a viable alternative, accepted a position with the Régie where he pursued a successful career, whilst simultaneously moonlighting as one of its harshest critics. Cases like Hamann's make it difficult to accept the hard and fast definition of ‘bourgeoisness’ that some of the critics have employed. Instead, it may be more fruitful to approach the question of the public sphere's social identity, at least in relation to fiscal matters, from a different angle. The ‘bourgeois’ character of fiscal debates does not derive from the social identity of those involved, but rather from the underlying conflict that prompted such debates. As Joseph Schumpeter has pointed out, the very notion of taxation implies the existence of an ‘individual economy’ clearly distinct from the state. Similarly inseparable are an economy managed by private individuals for the interest of private individuals, with notions of privacy. Schumpeter describes the nexus with unparalleled wit:
The individual economy makes the individual – or the family – dependent upon himself and forces him, as the apple in paradise, to open his eyes to the economic realities of the world and to read his purpose out of his interest. His horizon narrows, his life settles down in his own spiritual house, and he looks at the world only through his window – and not very far at that, for soon his view is obstructed by the walls of other such houses.Footnote 18
In eighteenth-century Prussia, there was still much direct state involvement in the rural economy through ownership of substantial royal domains. In the towns, however, the beginning of the tax state can be seen: a political order that, in principle, left economic matters to individuals and was thus forced to cover its financial needs through taxation, rather than through ‘earning’ money from direct ownership of economic activities. Fiscal conflicts and associated debates could not therefore have occurred without at least the rudimentary existence of an economy based on specifically bourgeois modes of production and consumption and associated notions of privacy. Fiscal questions were not the only areas where the interaction of private enterprise and state administration led to frictions in Prussia; Mittenzwei has for example shown the importance of contemporary conflicts about free-trade and other economic policies.Footnote 19
Closely related to questions of the public sphere's bourgeois nature is another potent criticism. Critics of Habermas questioned whether a public that was, by definition, composed of diverging opinions should really be regarded as an opposition force to the state.Footnote 20 In the fiscal context, while texts critical of the Régie dominated the debate, opposing views can often be found. Should we therefore understand these fiscal debates as a form of consultation where diverging opinions balance out each other and made the public, as a whole, politically neutral vis-à-vis the state? In the case of fiscal debates, this view misunderstands the nature of the threat to the state's authority posed by public debates. The challenge did not so much lie in opinions expressed, but in the fact that the venue for deliberating and determining fiscal matters was diverted from the corridors of state power. Eighteenth-century states kept their finances largely secret and financial decisions were mostly held to be a royal prerogative. Those who wrote either for or against a government's policies challenged this prerogative. Public expression of an opinion implicitly claimed that the public had a say in such matters that should be heard. But the idea of being obliged to consider alternative views from outside the state apparatus (and even from within it, as Erhard Ursinus had occasion to ponder during his yearlong sojourn in Spandau) was deemed an insufferable challenge to their authority by monarchs such as Frederick II.
The development of public responses to the fiscal reforms of Frederick II and his successor, Frederick William II, is explored in broadly chronological order, returning to these historiographical questions where appropriate. The first section outlines the central objectives of Frederick's fiscal reforms before examining the public's reactions in the form of petitions and smuggling, letters and pamphlets, and, finally, in an intensive exchange of printed texts.
I
Improving the tax administration's efficiency was one of Frederick II's priorities on ascending to the throne in 1740. Like his predecessors, Frederick realized that Prussia's ability to become a great European power depended largely on its ability to sustain much higher per capita expenses for its military than other countries. This could be achieved through improved collection and administration of taxation and through a simultaneous broadening of the tax base, specifically more economic growth and less fiscal privilege. Frederick saw reform of the excise – a motley mix of indirect taxes including sales taxes and customs payments levied only in the towns and at the town gates – as crucial to achieve both objectives. A better organized and less corrupt administration not only meant less evasion, but also meant a more effective implementation of royal policies to promote commerce and industry which relied heavily on fiscal tools such as monopolies, bans on foreign products, protective tariffs, and subsidies to domestic industries.
At the heart of attempts to reform the excise were its officials.Footnote 21 They often lacked essential administrative skills, were corrupt or colluded with merchants and consumers; in short, they were anything but loyal servants of the state.Footnote 22 The chief concern of Frederick's reforms was therefore to separate the fiscal administration from the tax-payers and to regulate their reciprocal interaction. These intentions were reflected in a new set of instructions for excise officials enacted in the 1740s, which focused on officers' conduct and especially on imposing a clear division between the operations they carried out as excise officers from their private capacities.Footnote 23 This separation was partly associated with physical spaces: the excise was always to be collected in the same ‘loco publico’. In small towns where no venue was available, officers were instructed to choose a ‘specially designated room’ in their house. Official acts had to be carried out by the employee himself whilst his wife and children were to leave the ‘excise room’ during times of official business. Additional temporal and financial constraints were imposed to ensure the separation of public and private funds.Footnote 24
Another set of rules applied to excise officers' interaction with tax-payers. Officials had the right to search baggage, vehicles, workshops, shops, houses, barns, basements, attics, and rooms of those suspected of tax fraud. The right to intrude on tax-payers' privacy was, however, also curtailed in important ways. A ‘sufficient reason’ for suspicion was needed and all searches had to be conducted carefully to avoid damaging or inconveniencing tax-payers. Delays at gates were particularly to be avoided. Officers that undertook controls out of ‘arbitrariness’ or ‘affect’, or who treated tax-payers ‘impolitely’, were to be severely punished.Footnote 25
Central to reforms was the division between the sphere belonging to the state and that of individual privacy. A distinction was drawn both between private individuals and officials and between the different sides of individuals in the state's employ. It was acknowledged that an excise official was also a private individual but when he wore his ‘official hat’ he ceased to be a private man, just as he reversed into a private individual when he left his office or when his office hours ended.Footnote 26 Clarification of the boundaries between individual private spheres and that of the state, described here from the Prussian state's perspective, was the same process that generated lines of conflict where frictions between state officials and private individuals gave rise to public debate.Footnote 27 For however much the administration tried to separate spheres, and to acknowledge the private sphere as distinct, contact and interference between the two spheres were inevitable in excise collection. Elaborate attempts to limit such frictions by regulating interaction between tax-payers and collectors illustrate that contemporary administrators acknowledged the potential for conflict, but the need for increased administrative efficiency was a strong motive to further the separation of the state and its organs from the wider public.
II
After the Seven Years' War, it became apparent that Frederick's attempts to make the excise administration a more efficient and loyal instrument of the Prussian state remained largely unsuccessful. The war had brought Prussia and other European countries to the brink of financial collapse. New revenue needed to be raised, but foreign occupation and the war effort had placed considerable strain on the Prussian economy. In this difficult climate, Frederick sought to increase taxes. Although the amount that he asked for was moderate, his administration refused to carry out the orders deeming the new charges too onerous on the population.Footnote 28
Frederick refused to compromise and decided to create a completely new excise administration to be staffed by foreigners. About 350 Frenchmen filled the higher ranks of the administration which came to be known as the Régie.Footnote 29 This was not necessarily an unusual step in Prussia for, on many occasions, the Hohenzollerns had employed foreigners with skills that could not be found in Prussia.Footnote 30 Skilled immigrants may not have been new in Prussia, but it was a bold step to entrust an administration as sensitive as the excise to officials who were not part of local hierarchies. Despite Frederick's efforts, in some Prussian provinces all officials were still recruited from the ranks of local nobility.Footnote 31 By recruiting French officials, Frederick took an important step towards creating a loyal body of civil servants. The process of drawing a sharp distinction between the sphere of the state and the private spheres of tax-payers was expedited by their recruitment in a way that could not have been achieved by new administrative guidelines. The new excise administration was more professional and loyal than any of its predecessors.
From a fiscal view point these qualities made the institution a success story. Compared to the fiscal year 1765–6, annual gross revenues increased by between 7 and 57 per cent in the twenty years during which the Régie operated. The additional net revenue generated was equally substantial despite the disproportionate increase in the cost of collection.Footnote 32 The rising marginal cost of collecting additional revenue through the Régie points to the political costs associated with the new tax administration. It reflected a fiscal reality in which every additional Thaler extracted from Prussia's tax payers required more controls and sanctions. The Régie could deliver the necessary pressure, and hence the additional revenue, but this ability to carry out the king's orders also created political problems which ultimately led to the administration's abolition in the face of public pressure.
The new administration's immediate objective was to raise additional revenue by making the excise collection and administration more efficient, primarily by fighting smuggling and corruption. But Frederick's intentions also extended to developing new excise tariffs. Among the principal changes was the abolition of most forms of grain excise, which was compensated by increased taxation of wine, beer, and brandy intended to shift the tax burden towards wealthier consumers.Footnote 33 Fiscal justice, however, was only a secondary concern. The primary objective was to turn the excise into an efficient tool for directing and promoting economic activity. The tasks of protecting domestic industries against foreign competition and of supporting new industries by subsidies were largely entrusted to the Régie. Protective tariffs and bans of certain imports were not new, but the Régie was henceforth to enforce such policies more effectively. The new administration also sought to change consumer habits for non-economic motives. Whilst urban Prussians had taken to consuming increasing volumes of luxury goods, such new consumer habits were regarded with suspicion by the king. Whilst the consumption of coffee, tobacco, brandy, and other products helped to fill royal coffers, it was also associated with moral and health concerns.Footnote 34
Frederick thus pursued multiple objectives with the new administration. But while the objectives were diverse the means to achieve them had one important characteristic in common: they meant greater interference with the ways in which urban Prussia produced and consumed goods. Paradoxically, the creation of the Régie resulted at the same time in better-defined boundaries between the spheres of the state and of private individuals and in more frequent and more intrusive transgressions of that boundary by the state.
III
Although tax payers' opposition to the new regime did not immediately take the form of public protest, from the onset the conflict contained elements of collaboration and collective resistance which must have included forms of public debate among tax-payers although such debates are often difficult to reconstruct. Until the last moment, towns tried to avoid the creation of the new centralized administration. Merchants in the western town of Minden even collectively offered to pay the excise revenue quarterly in advance if they were allowed to organize tax collection themselves.Footnote 35 Frederick initially replied that placing merchants in charge of the excise would be like ‘setting a fox to keep the geese’.Footnote 36
Soon, however, he was forced to change his mind. The merchants in the commercially more developed western provinces of Kleve, Moers, and Mark vigorously resisted the increased interference with their businesses associated with the Régie. Already in the first months of its existence the Régie had to request military support to inspect the accounting books of local merchants in Krefeld. Faced with strong opposition and on advice of his ministers Frederick grudgingly decided to abolish the Régie in the western provinces only a year after its introduction and to replace it with the payment of a fixed sum which was collected by local authorities without central state control. The Régie's early failure did not mean the end of fiscal conflicts there, but it set the western provinces on a different path of fiscal development from the rest of Prussia. For this reason, and also because fiscal conflicts in the western provinces have been studied elsewhere by Mittenzwei, we will concentrate on developments in the other Prussian provinces.Footnote 37
Where attempts to abolish the Régie were not immediately successful, urban tax-payers began to resist the new administration mainly through petitioning, smuggling, and violent attacks, as confirmed in reports of the Kammern to the king, and through his replies and the Régie's reactions.Footnote 38 Discontent was mainly provoked by the new administrative procedures and associated delays and intrusions. In a lengthy Pro-Memoria, the Kammerpräsident of Königsberg described the various vexations. No less than four new types of forms (Zettel) had been introduced by the new administration. In addition, new and more elaborate registers were kept about goods and taxes. Despite additional officers at the gates, many ‘excisees’ had to wait long hours. During a recent fair, some merchants had been kept waiting at the gates from three a.m. to midday. In particular, those with fresh produce had ‘suffered very much’. In addition to the ‘running to and fro’ necessary to complete all procedures, delays also resulted from more thorough searches and the application of seals to merchandise.Footnote 39 Many goods had to be opened and unpacked at special stations, which created further delays and were regarded as intrusive and vexatious. In some cases, merchants had apparently preferred to return home rather than be searched.Footnote 40
Elsewhere, wine-merchants, brewers, and distillers in the towns complained about lengthy administrative procedures and daily visitations of their shops by Régie officials. These controls served fiscal purposes but also ensured that prescribed quality standards were maintained (mostly as a way to ensure that appropriate duties were paid).Footnote 41 Officials therefore not only demanded the right to inspect books and inventories but also demanded physical access to the workshops and interfered with production processes. The majority of the many complaints from producers and merchants about the Régie concentrated on perceived ‘ill treaments’, ‘despotism’, ‘arbitrariness’, and ‘drudgery’.Footnote 42
Besides producers and merchants also consumers and other private individuals were subjected to intrusive treatments. The vivid description of Johanna Schopenhauer – daughter and wife of prominent Danzig merchants and mother of Arthur Schopenhauer – of the Régie's controls deserves to be quoted at length:
Neither rented coaches and equipages nor wagoner's and peasant's coaches were spared detailed searches. Ladies and children sometimes had to alight from their coaches in a torrent downpour and wait patiently without a roof over their heads and under the scornful laughter of their tormentors until the latter had completed their slow visitation of even the most hidden spaces in the coach. After that began the search of the individuals … A type of light hoop skirts that was in fashion at the time which had roomy pockets of which the contents could not be seen easily from the outside were a major object of suspicion for the French riff-raff. No lady could refuse to empty her pockets in front of them if she did not want to expose herself to the most insulting treatment … House searches which no one could refuse without exposing himself to the threat of a heavy punishment happened every day and coffee-smellers … searched in courtyards, homes and kitchens for the smell of freshly roasted coffee which could only be bought ready-roasted within the Prussian borders.Footnote 43
Six years into the new administration, the king noted ‘with sorrow’ in 1772 that the complaints had not subsided.Footnote 44 Undeterred, he vigorously defended the Régie, insisting that although vexations had to be avoided, tighter controls were necessary to achieve ‘my interests and those of the public’.Footnote 45 The king's steadfastness resulted in the increase of another form of resistance: reports about smuggling grew dramatically. This was partly because stricter controls revealed more illicit trade and partly because controls and higher tariffs rendered smuggling more lucrative. Coffee and other luxury goods were among the most commonly smuggled wares since a rapidly growing consumer culture had made them indispensable commodities for many urban Prussians who resented the new tax regime's interference in what one contemporary Prussian called ‘superfluities that had become necessities’.Footnote 46 On the other hand, king and Régie saw nothing wrong with imposing heavier taxes on luxury items, believing that, since their consumption was a choice rather than a necessity, consumers had implicitly given their consent to paying the taxes.Footnote 47 Moreover, if consumers refrained from purchasing luxury goods, which were often imported, they would thereby assist domestic industry and help to channel revenue from consumption into productive investments.Footnote 48 Where Protestantism proved insufficient to inspire thrifty bourgeois ethics, Frederick's fiscal regime sought to exercise an educational influence.
However well intended, Prussian consumers did not appreciate such interference into their private habits.Footnote 49 Whereas producers and merchants expressed discontent mainly in petitions, consumers resorted to buying contraband as another form of anti-Régie resistance. For contemporaries, smuggling was more than simply a form of crime. In his comments on Prussia, Gabriel de Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, described the increase in smuggling as one of the ‘strange disorders’ in which ‘public opinion’ (opinion public) about the excise expressed itself.Footnote 50 In the same vein, Heinrich von Beguelin, who occupied a leading position in the excise administration after the Régie's end, described how the victims of punishment for contraband were regarded as ‘martyrs’ of popular protest against the hated Régie.Footnote 51 Smuggling could also turn violent. As controls and punishments successively increased in reaction to the high volume of contraband, complaints about ill treatment by Régie officials also rose, together with more violent incidents. By 1776, Frederick observed that smugglers were becoming bolder and even dared to fire at royal hussars.Footnote 52 Cases of violent resistance against the Régie, such as that of a Berlin victualler Schulze who shot an official, were not isolated. Harsh punishments meted out – Schulze was to be broken on the wheel – further escalated the conflict.Footnote 53 Violent resistance also assumed collective forms. Smugglers might ‘band together’ and violently threaten excise officers whilst confrontations with the Régie led to ‘riots’ among the urban population.Footnote 54
Rioting, smuggling, and petition-writing were probably associated with elements of oral debate which are now impossible to reconstruct. Long-distance trade and smuggling networks may have created greater pan-Prussian connections but, at this stage, opposition remained ultimately regionally fragmented and drew on a rudimentary public. Even a fragmented public nevertheless constituted a substantial challenge to royal authority associated with direct and violent attacks on state representatives and intended to limit the state's ability to act. The state was also challenged by such developments on another level. While Frederick rejected ‘comments’ on his fiscal policies by anyone ‘not appointed to be a judge’, in such matters his view that these policies protected ‘my interests and those of the public’ was questioned by the acts of rioters, smugglers, and petitioners who implicitly claimed to know their interests better than the state.Footnote 55 Likewise, those purchasing contraband challenged the state's attempts to determine what they should consume. Hence, the state's authority to take or influence decisions in matters of commerce, production, and consumption was questioned through various forms of anti-excise resistance.
IV
A Prussian, and even European, network of public debates developed only gradually from these local conflicts. The rich source material bequeathed by the philosopher and tax official Hamann supplies insight into the connection between personal experience and public reasoning. Hamann was well known to a Prussian, and even European, public despite living in peripheral Königsberg. He was also, however, notoriously short of money and it was thus that the ‘veteran of Apollo’ eventually accepted a position as a ‘publican’ with the Régie in 1767.Footnote 56 Hamann's mentor Kant had been instrumental in securing the post. Despite initial reluctance, Hamann pursued his administrative career with considerable energy and success and rose from translator to ‘Licent Pack Hofmeister’ in charge of several officials.Footnote 57 Paradoxically, Hamann became simultaneously one of the most vocal critics of the excise administration. His criticism was informed by first-hand experience, as well as by a longstanding interest in political economy and a critical stance towards Frederick II's modernizing state.
From 1767, much of Hamann's correspondence with Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Nicolai, Friedrich Hartknoch and other members of the Prussian intelligentsia became a running and often harshly critical commentary on the Régie.Footnote 58 In his letters, fellow administrators were described as ‘thieves’, ‘bastards’, and ‘vagabonds’; only ironically did Hamann refer to his employer and king as ‘Salomo’.Footnote 59 Initially, his letters primarily concerned his own interests and career within the Régie. For example, he spent much time quarrelling with his employer as to whether a certain type of payments made by merchants to officials in Hamann's position was a ‘royal or a private revenue’.Footnote 60 Very quickly, however, such concerns to delineate ‘Hamann the private individual’ from ‘Hamann the royal tax official’ merged with a broader critique of the Régie's political and commercial implications. Hamann accused the Régie of oppressing the people's initiative to ‘wheel and deal’ and even of robbing Prussians of their ‘will to live’.Footnote 61 Royal efforts to end corruption in the Régie were hypocritical since the whole administration had been created to steal for the king.Footnote 62 Consequently, commerce in Königsberg was ‘consumptive’ and ‘on its last legs’ whilst the Régie was as popular with the population as ‘Moses's horns’.Footnote 63 This allegory doubtlessly supplied an ironic comment on Prussia's enlightened government: Moses had acquired the ‘horns’ which frightened the Israelites after he had received the divine law during his encounter with God on Mount Sinai. According to Hamann, Prussians were equally afraid of encounters with the Régie because the administration was one of the excesses of a state that considered itself in possession of absolute enlightened truth.
As Hamann's frustration with the Régie increased, he started to articulate it to a larger public although his first attempt at publishing a short piece entitled Au Salomo de Prusse failed in 1772. Initially, he could not find a publisher and subsequently Herder prevented publication of the text presumably fearing that Hamann might be taking too great a risk by attacking the king and the ‘arithmeticiens politiques’ of his tax administration.Footnote 64 Curiously, however, it was an official request, perhaps from within the administration, to comment on Guillaume Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes (1770) that facilitated Hamann's most comprehensive public criticism.Footnote 65 In the two editions of A un financier de Pe-Kim (1773), Hamann merged theoretical criticism of Raynal's work with attacks on Prussian fiscal practice.Footnote 66 Hamann attacked Raynal as one of the ‘ragoutistes de l'Encyclopédie’ who were exercising excessive influence on Frederick's government. He feared this ‘most modern of enthusiast for humanity’ and his associates who armed governments with coolly rational, radical, and allegedly universal truths.Footnote 67 Ensuing modernizing reforms replaced moral responsibilities of government with ‘arithmetique politique’ and threatened to eclipse traditional customs and livelihoods and individual religiosity and morals.Footnote 68 Hamann gloomily predicted that ‘this is only the dawn of an aurora that is the sign of a golden age when the Fredericks d'Or will shine brighter than the stars of most brilliant winter night’.Footnote 69 Previously, Hamann had warned that governments excessively concerned with finance thereby neglected ethics as the core of the art of governance.Footnote 70 For Hamann, the Régie was the concrete expression of this modern obsession with finance. He blamed ‘languishing’ commerce and the prospect of an epidemic of ‘mortalité mercantile’ on the government's fiscal modernization, warning that commerce, if subjected to excessive pressure, would suddenly break and hurt the ‘hand that oppresses it’.Footnote 71 Faced with this type of enlightened reform, Hamann wrote, the ‘Prussian eskimos’ petitioned their king to introduce the Jesuits to exterminate such ‘modern paganism’ to save the kingdom's ‘fabrics’ and ‘commerce’.Footnote 72
Although Hamann was not the only critic to express his concerns in print his case stands out in several respects. His writings reveal how individual frustration with fiscal practice led to the articulation of public criticism in letters and pamphlets that extended beyond a local public. Hamann told a Prussian, German, and potentially even a European public about his grievances. His commentary was in every respect part of a broader continental debate about political economy. Hamann's reply to Raynal was not only informed by personal experience, but also confirmed him as an avid reader of contemporary financial and political literature. He even tried to obtain a copy of Jean-Louis Moreau de Beaumont's survey of the European fiscal systems which was a much coveted work since it contained the most comprehensive and reliable information about contemporary fiscal systems.Footnote 73 Pondering fiscal questions in another northern commercial hub in the same period, Adam Smith used a copy of Beaumont sent to him by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, as the main source for the tax chapters in his Wealth of nations (1776).Footnote 74 To support his argument against the imported French political arithmetic Hamann also translated substantial parts of Ferdinando Galiani's Discours sur le commerce des bles (1770) and published extracts in the Königsbergsche Zeitung.Footnote 75 While Hamann's criticism of the Régie was rooted in local experience, his comments thus formed part of a European public sphere that was highly politicized in its reformatory zeal.
Hamman's criticism was clearly public and politicized but was it part of a bourgeois public sphere? He was, by birth, part of the Königsberg middle class as his father was a barber-surgeon and his later career was typical in confirming how the state's employ was often the only possible option for young educated bourgeois.Footnote 76 Hamann's experience casts doubts on the view that the state employment of many public commentators meant that the Prussian public was a state-led affair. Paradoxically, Hamann put considerable distance between himself and his employer when writing but indentified with the state when inspecting merchants. He was thus a loyal civil servant when he refused a merchant's bribe in the morning and a critically minded member of the public sphere when writing his pamphlets in the evening.Footnote 77 Hamman was certainly not a cynic. His double life reflected the separation of private individual and state official that both the manuals of the Prussian administration and the ethos of the bourgeois public demanded. Excise officers were drilled to keep their private live separate from their existence as public officials. In the same vein, members of the Republic of Letters and of Enlightenment societies were invited to leave worldly rank, hierarchy, and profession behind and to encounter each other as private men in the public sphere.
In the self-perception of members of this public, it was not hypocritical to act in one way as an official and to think in another as a citizen. Kant used the terms ‘private use of reason’ and ‘public use of reason’ to clarify this distinction. The ‘public use of reason’ which must, for Kant, remain completely free was the use that a ‘learned person’ made ‘before the reading public’. By contrast, the ‘private use of reason’ occurred in the context of ‘a civic post or office’.Footnote 78 ‘Here’, Kant continued, ‘one certainly must not argue, instead one must obey’ because the individual was part of a ‘machine’ which would not function with independently minded parts. It was, however, perfectly possible for the same person to make use of his or her reason in private and in public in different ways without contradiction: ‘It would be disastrous if an officer on duty who was given a command by his superior were to question the appropriateness or utility of the order. He must obey. But as a scholar he cannot be justly constrained from making comments about errors in military service.’ Applied to matters of taxation, this meant that ‘the citizen cannot refuse to pay the taxes imposed on him’ but ‘the same person does not act contrary to civic duty when, as a scholar, he publicly expresses his thoughts regarding the impropriety or even injustice of such taxes’.Footnote 79 As seen, Kant underestimated the extent to which limits between public reasoning and civic disobedience were blurred. Nevertheless, it is anachronistic to regard state employment of public commentators as an indication of a significant role of the state's hand in the process of enlightenment. For Kant and his contemporaries, Hamann's condition was not only rather common, but also not deemed to imply any limits on the independent use of reason in a public context.Footnote 80
Just as the public sphere was not state-led because of the state employment of some authors, it was not primarily bourgeois because of the way in which such authors derived their livelihoods. Despite his social origin, Hamann was not a bourgeois in the narrow sense of someone mainly engaged in commercial activity.Footnote 81 The conflicts on which he commented, however, would not have arisen had it not been for the development of a private bourgeois sphere of ‘wheeling and dealing’ which found itself in conflict with the interference of an overreaching state that armed itself with the universal truths of an age of enlightenment.
By the early 1780s, not only men of letters, merchants, artisans, and consumers had begun to oppose the Régie, but even Frederick II was increasingly frustrated with the institution. The king was particularly preoccupied by the rampant contraband which reduced fiscal revenue and rendered protective tariffs inefficient.Footnote 82 Unlike Mirabeau and other commentators, he did not interpret contraband as implying the public's verdict on the institution. For Fredrick, the problem of the Régie was not a lack of legitimacy, but of loyalty and honesty on the part of many officials. In particular his opinion of the French administrators had changed dramatically.Footnote 83 Responding to a request from an official to leave Prussia for a visit to France the king gave permission, adding: ‘There is no need for him to return because we do not need him here. He is like most of these Frenchmen: … they come here obtain leading position in the Régie, plunder the provinces and when they have made their profit they return to France.’ In the future, he instructed the head of the Régie, Antoine de la Haye de Launay: ‘I do not want anymore that you employ Frenchmen in such positions but good officers [“Quartiers Maitres”] of our regiments who could work some time at the Régie in order to learn the skills required before their appointments.’Footnote 84 Another measure intended to prevent officers from pursuing private interests, rather than orders, was abolition of the Tantiemen, a share of the tax payments collected, to which many Régie officials were entitled. Just as bribes encouraged officials to be less vigilant than they should, the Tantiemen were an incentive for officials to exceed in their zeal to collect taxes.Footnote 85 With these measures, the king continued to pursue an objective central to his fiscal policy since the beginning of his reign: the creation of a loyal and professional administration. The changes did little, however, to solve the contraband problem. From the perspective of many tax payers the real problem was not officials who could be convinced with a small bribe to bend the rules, but rather those who followed instructions to the letter. As Hamann had pointed out, the problem was not stealing officers, but an institution that had been set up to steal for the king.
In the years before Frederick's death in 1786, we can thus observe a growing disaffection with the Régie that extended not only to tax payers, administrators, and men of letters, but also to the king himself. We can only speculate, however, as to whether Frederick's growing frustration with aspects of the Régie would eventually have led him to abolish the whole institution or where his steadfastness in the face of growing public discontent may have led.
V
After Frederick II's death, the conflict over the Régie inspired a rapidly increasing quantity of printed declarations, pamphlets, and multi-volume treatises that started to influence political change in fiscal matters. Public debate unfolded alongside the confidential hearings and deliberations of a commission for reform of the excise established in 1786 by Frederick William II which concluded its work in the following June. In the public trial that accompanied the commission's work, ideas already ‘widespread in many agitated and ambitious heads’ during the former king's reign were publicly expressed. The clamour of ‘learned puffs’ and ‘political quacks’ became ubiquitous, and defenders of the late king, such as his personal physician, Johann Zimmermann, were indignant that public commentators dared to ‘put themselves in the place’ of a great monarch and hereby claimed superior knowledge of the business of governing.Footnote 86 Much of the public criticism of Frederick focused on his fiscal policies. ‘The voices of the discontented who loudly called for free trade were ubiquitous’ as Carl von Struensee, a prominent member of the Mittwochsgesellschaft and later finance minister, pointed out. Struensee was himself part of this growing chorus of commentators calling for free trade, whilst also reflecting on the increasing power of the public. An article by Struensee in Berlinische Monatsschrift about Frederick's trade policies together with those of his successor Frederick William II, began and ended with the exclamation ‘How kings have to suffer to be judged!’ The ‘clamour’ of the public, Struensee noted, had become so powerful that it was influencing commercial policies under the new king.Footnote 87 Another commentator feared that the ‘clamours of the public’ had become so agitated that the public in Berlin might turn violent and that ‘people may be beaten up unnecessarily’. The ‘people’ in question were the king's leading excise officers.Footnote 88
Besides the escalation of the fiscal conflict and the dynastic transition, two other factors contributed to the debate's escalation: pre-revolutionary events in France and the spread of statistical information about fiscal matters. The publication of Jacques Necker's Compte rendue (1781) and subsequent fiscal debates associated with the Revolution were eagerly followed in Prussia. Between 1788 and 1790, Struensee contributed sixteen pieces entitled ‘On the latest financial condition of France’ to Berlinische Monatsschrift.Footnote 89 Increasing availability of information about France's financial condition stimulated curiosity about Prussia's finances that had been ‘covered in the most profound secrecy’ during Frederick's reign.Footnote 90 In Prussia, however, this veil of secrecy had already begun to be lifted through the spread of statistical information, before news about the imminent financial collapse of the Bourbon monarchy reached the country. As early as 1775, the pioneer of modern statistical geography, Anton Friedrich Büsching, published an account of his travels in the Prussian provinces including much statistical information and details about state finances, subsequently used by other authors in this debate.Footnote 91 Information about fiscal matters was not, however, only provided by private authors. From 1780, Frederick's foreign minister (Kabinettsminister), Ewald Friedrich von Hertzberg, presented items of information about fiscal and other state affairs in annual discourses in public meetings of the Berlin Academy. His intention was to administer a form of ‘wise publicity’ in carefully controlled doses to convince the public of royal policies.Footnote 92 To the extent that the intention was to convince the public of Frederick's fiscal policies, it must be considered a failure. Instead, increasing availability of information about the state finances of Prussia and other European countries from different sources contributed substantially to the formation of networks of critical public debate about fiscal matters that extended beyond local contexts.
Within the far-reaching fiscal debate that unfolded after Frederick's death, we shall focus on an issue central to contemporary commentators: the relationship between the interests of private individuals and the common interest represented by the state. This relationship was seen as crucial to delineate between the private sphere and the state and hence for the legitimacy of government interference in private matters for taxation purposes. One of the first surviving contributions to this debate was a pamphlet defending the Régie's coffee and tobacco monopoly by an officer, Heinrich Adrian Graf von Borcke, who had been chosen by Frederick II as a mentor for his young nephew, later Frederick William II. Borcke had remained close to both kings, but at the time of writing, had retired to his country estate, where he had turned his attention to matters of political economy. As public pressure for the abolition of monopolies increased after Frederick's death, Borcke wrote a small book summarizing and refuting public criticism against the monopolies.Footnote 93 Interestingly, although Borcke might have hoped to receive a sympathetic reception had he tried to convey his advice to his former pupil, or to the members of the commission in private, he nevertheless chose to publish his views. His audience was the reading public that started to lead the king's hand in such policy decisions.
Borcke's pamphlet appeared shortly before publication of the edict abolishing the monopoly in January 1787. In the edict, Frederick William explicitly identified the objective of his new policy as being to ‘move everything out of the way that … serves to constrain commerce and trade’ and thereby revive ‘all branches of bourgeois business’ through the application of ‘fair and equitable freedom’.Footnote 94 This argument also featured prominently in Borcke's opening summary of public criticism: the monopoly was denounced for the ‘hard’ and ‘oppressive’ operations of customs and excise that limited the freedom of trade and compromised ‘natural freedom’ and ‘property rights’.Footnote 95 Since Borcke believed that the Régie's excessively intrusive and vexatious methods were the principal cause of public criticism, he suggested immediately ending searches of private homes.Footnote 96 Nevertheless, he defended in principle the necessity of state interference in commercial matters. Ending the monopoly and the resulting ‘suffocation’ of ‘domestic fabrics’ was certainly in the ‘interest’ of merchants who could anticipate a flourishing business with foreign tobaccos, but the effect of free trade on domestic manufacturing in a country in ‘visible physical and moral growth’ such as Prussia would be devastating.Footnote 97
The king and vocal members of the public were, however, unconvinced by Borcke's arguments. His tract provoked two anonymous replies that took issue with his arguments in a remarkably similar tenor. Both welcomed abolition of the monopoly, whilst one thanked the king for liberating the country of the ‘devils’, ‘barbarians’, and ‘mob of demons’ that had been the Régie.Footnote 98 Subtle differences distinguished the two refutations of Borcke. The first author defended the private citizens' economic freedom as an inalienable right. As much as Borcke deserved esteem as a ‘defender of the common interest’, he should be condemned for trying to prove ‘with sophistry and contradictions’ to the ‘citizen … that his liberation will make him a slave’. The Régie's abuses were inevitable consequences of the monopoly and no legitimate case could be made for such oppressive interference with the liberty of producers, merchants, and consumers.Footnote 99 The second author took a slightly different approach. He denounced Borcke's ‘nasty’ depiction of merchants and opposed the very notion of a contradiction between the private interests of merchants and the common interest; a free coffee and tobacco trade was equally in the interest of all involved.Footnote 100 However, the common ground among the three authors is perhaps more revealing than their differences. All agreed that the state and the private activities of consumption and production formed separate, but interacting, spheres. Interference in private matters was inevitable, but the question was how it should be carried out, whether it could be done in an acceptable manner, where limits should be drawn and to what extent interests of state and private individuals diverged.
The debate about monopolies contributed to a larger, related, public controversy over reform of the Régie's other operations. Like exchanges about the monopolies, this debate began with a pamphlet commenting publicly on matters being put before the reform commission. Only that in this case the author did not write to slow the reformatory zeal, but to expedite it. Mirabeau, the author in question, had been in Berlin since July 1786, partly on an official mission for the French court to observe Frederick's imminent death and the first moves of his successor. At the same time, however, Mirabeau was also in Berlin as a Physiocratic missionary; having failed in his attempts to convert Frederick, he energetically sought to convince the new king and the Prussian public of his teachings. Unsurprisingly, the Régie was an anathema to the count. It sinned against the physiocratic maxims of laissez-faire and of a single tax on agricultural surplus. Mirabeau therefore seized the opportunity to contribute to the end of the institution and to encourage the new monarch to implement a wide range of reforms by publishing a small pamphlet entitled Lettre remise a Fréd. Guillaume II roi régnant de Prusse, le jour de son avènement au trône.Footnote 101 This tract unleashed a public controversy about the Régie that invoked familiar arguments, but became more intense and more widespread than preceding exchanges. Once Mirabeau had publicly attacked Frederick's fiscal policy, Zimmermann responded by defending the Régie.Footnote 102 Meanwhile, Mirabeau had completed a more substantial and well-informed critique of Frederick's policies: the monumental four volumes of De la monarchie Prussienne (1788), an entire volume of which was devoted to a detailed critique of the tax administration, including commentary on Borcke and his critics.Footnote 103 This attack attracted contributions from Zimmermann, de Launay, and the minister Ewald Friedrich von Hertzberg;Footnote 104 in turn provoking a number of counter-attacks including one by the standard-bearer of the Berlin Enlightenment, Friedrich Nicolai.Footnote 105 Only in 1791, after the Régie's critics had triumphed, did the debate abate.Footnote 106
In his initial public letter, Mirabeau fiercely attacked the ‘fiscal robbery’ and urged Frederick William to lower or abolish indirect taxes. In particular, the king was urged to ‘relegate to hell’ oppressive powers granted to the Régie to pursue and punish smugglers.Footnote 107 As Mirabeau later explained, it was less the excise's financial burden than its ‘manners’ and ‘humiliating vexations’ that disgusted merchants and rendered commerce near impossible.Footnote 108 ‘We would have paid voluntarily the sum that this hated administration collected’, Mirabeau cited ‘thousands’ of nameless Prussian tax-payers, ‘if only commerce had been free.’Footnote 109 This argument was countered by de Launay who emphasized the care taken in drafting the Régie's operative rules and the many instances in which disciplinary action had been taken against officials guilty of abuses. De Launay also maintained, however, that where officials had acted within the rules, no abuse could have taken place by definition. Formalities, he argued, were the ‘natural consequences’ of the law and therefore ‘vex no one when they are followed’.Footnote 110 Mirabeau made a similar connection, insisting that intrusive searches and draconic punishments were not accidental, but inevitably associated with the excise. The only remedy was therefore for the monarch to fix the amount of revenue required by the state and to leave tax collection to tax-payers themselves.Footnote 111 The controversy was clearly not about excesses of the Régie's personnel that could be remedied by better discipline or by introducing gentler tax collectors. What was at stake was the legitimacy of laws that allowed the state to collect the tax and thereby to intrude deeply into the private spheres of thousands of urban Prussians.
The Régie's defenders therefore concentrated on demonstrating the necessity of intrusions, not only in terms of the royal prerogative but also as a means of safeguarding the common good against narrow private interests.Footnote 112 Replying to Mirabeau, de Launay explained that Frederick's intentions had primarily been to promote industry, which was a view supposed by Zimmermann in 1790: ‘No other wish and purpose did the king have with the Régie besides … helping domestic factories.’Footnote 113 According to de Launay, fiscal motives and commercial growth were subordinate to this objective because only industry could provide employment and prosperity to the people.Footnote 114 To ‘manage industry’ (‘ménager l'industrie’) in this way, it was necessary to collect statistical information, introduce protective tariffs, ban certain foreign products, and to encourage and, on occasion, even to force Prussian entrepreneurs to open new factories.Footnote 115 Whilst such policies might hurt individual interests Zimmermann categorically rejected any broader criticism:
Forty or fifty thousand merchants of all classes must not believe that the welfare of the whole Prussian monarchy only depends on their living in happiness; on their right to bring foreign cloth, silken, woollen and cotton factory goods freely into the country even if this ruins the factories that are the livelihood of two million men in Prussia. Frederick the Great was more than right not to want what the merchants wanted.Footnote 116
Unsurprisingly, their opponents countered this defence by arguing that Frederick's policies had not actually helped Prussia's industry but had ruined it; indeed, much of the dispute between Hertzberg and Mirabeau concerned statistical evidence.Footnote 117 Mirabeau also, however, rejected the alleged incompatibility of common or state interest and private interests. Having already warned the king against ‘governing too much’, he argued that the citizens if left to ‘pursue their own business and their own greatest interest … will make that of the state and yours’.Footnote 118 In contrast to Frederick's opinions about the loyalties of merchants, Mirabeau even advised Frederick William to employ merchants to take care of his affairs wherever possible.Footnote 119
By 1791, critics of the Régie had prevailed and the debate was over. Their language had been adopted by Frederick William's reform edicts: freedom of trade was increased and vexatious searches and oppressive punishments for contraband were abolished.Footnote 120 The debate did not subside completely, however, but rather contributed to a more general debate about the limits of the state that became central to discourses of liberal and other thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wilhelm von Humboldt's seminal Of the limits of state action which informed John Stuart Mill's writings on the question was only published in 1851 but had been written in 1790–1 against the backdrop of debates explored in this article. In the tract, Humboldt did not directly comment on the Régie, but described indirect taxes as the least commendable form of taxation. ‘Experience teaches’, Humboldt wrote, ‘how many establishments are required by the introduction and collection [of indirect taxes] that are incompatible with the preceding arguments [about the limits of state action].’Footnote 121 This view is noteworthy because it contrasts sharply with the widespread contemporary notion that indirect taxes were best suited to a free form of government. This favourable assessment of the excise had emerged from the fiscal debates of the seventeenth century and Montesquieu had made it one of the cornerstones of his considerations about different types of governments and corresponding fiscal regimes in the Spirit of the laws (1748).Footnote 122 It seems likely that Humboldt – who was employed in the Ministry of Justice in 1790/1 – took an opposing view in the light of the Prussian government's troubled experience with the excise and the problems of the limits of state action thereby raised.Footnote 123
VI
Seen through the lens of the fiscal debate explored here, Prussia's burghers were clearly not afraid to challenge royal authority in different ways. Moreover, they did so successfully. Their opposition led the state to abolish an institution that, by purely fiscal standards, was highly successful. Clearly, urban tax-payers wielded real power in the process of negotiating fiscal policy. This increasingly self-reliant attitude towards the state owed much to a slow, but steady, progress of commerce and industry as well as to an expanding consumer culture. A willingness to defend civic interests was clearly, however, not limited to economic and fiscal matters. Shortly after the events described here, the state tried to regulate individual religiosity with Johann Christoph von Wöllner's edict which triggered a wave of public protest that forced the government to change course.Footnote 124 The modernization of Prussia thus appears to be a process that may have been accelerated by the defeat against Napoleon but that had started long before 1806. Furthermore, the internal balance of power had shifted in a way that prepared the country for ground-breaking change.
More widely, the conflicts explored here may also prompt a reconsideration of the broader place of Prussian history. In the eighteenth century, the inhabitants of Prussia's towns did not resort to revolutionary actions to defend their fiscal interests, but their concerns, tactics, and arguments were often similar, and connected to comparable conflicts in Europe and the Atlantic world. The similarities are far more striking than the obvious differences and explain why it was possible for tax administrators and commentators to move with relative ease between offices and salons in Paris and Berlin. Such contemporaries bolstered their fiscal arguments about Prussia with examples taken from Saxonia to Britain and from Sweden to Portugal; and individual countries were clearly not regarded as fundamentally different from another. After the demise of the Sonderweg thesis, this may now be an appropriate time to consider Prussian history in fiscal matters and elsewhere in the context of a European history that did not comprise a collection of special paths, but was a deeply interconnected and, in many ways, a synchronized development.
