page_title: Prussian Reform Movement
section_title: Nuances in criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Prussian Reform Movement / Historiography / Nuances in criticism
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Friedrich Wilhelm III.-Reiterstandbild auf dem Kölner Heumarkt. Gesamtansicht. This is a photograph of an architectural monument.It is on the list of cultural monuments of Köln, no. 60
context_page_description: The Prussian Reform Movement was a series of constitutional, administrative, social and economic reforms early in the nineteenth-century Kingdom of Prussia. They are sometimes known as the Stein-Hardenberg Reforms, for Karl Freiherr vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg, their main initiators. Before the Second World War, German historians, such as Heinrich von Treitschke, saw the reforms as the first steps towards the unification of Germany and the foundation of the German Empire.
  The reforms were a reaction to the defeat of the Prussians by Napoleon I at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, leading to the second Treaty of Tilsit, in which Prussia lost about half its territory and was forced to make massive tribute payments to France. To make those payments, it needed to rationalize its administration. Prussia's defeat and subjection also demonstrated the weaknesses of its absolute monarchy model of statehood and excluded it from the great powers of Europe.
  To become a great power again, it initiated reforms from 1807 onwards, based on Enlightenment ideas and in line with reforms in other European nations.
context_section_description: Today, the industrial reforms' success is also critiqued in a more nuanced way. They are considered not to have been the immediate reason for the artisans' misery, instead taken as the reduced influence of the legislation on their development. The historian Barbara Vogel tried to address an overall concept of agricultural and industrial approaches and to describe them as a "bureaucratic strategy of modernisation". When industrial development was taken into account, the policy of reforms is seen to certainly be centred on the encouragement of rural industry in the historic Prussian territories, thus allowing the onset of Prussia's industrial revolution.
  Reinhart Koselleck tried to give a general interpretation of the reform policy in view of the 1848 revolution, in his work Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution (Prussia between Reform and Revolution). He distinguished three different processes. The General State Laws represented – at the time of its publication – a reaction to social problems, but remained attached to corporative elements. Koselleck saw the birth of an administrative state during the reform era and during the reinforcement of the administration between 1815 and 1825 as an anticipation of the later constitution. However, in his view, the following decades saw the political and social movement suppressed by the bureaucracy. After the end of the reform period, Koselleck underlined that there was a rupture in the equilibrium between the high level civil servants and the bourgeois of the 'Bildungsbürgertum' who could not become civil servants. According to him, the bureaucracy represented the general interest against the individual interest and no national representative body was set up for fear of seeing the reforming movement stopped.
  The historian Hans Rosenberg and later the representatives of the Bielefeld School supported the theory that the end of the process which would have led to a constitution in Prussia was one of the reasons for the end to its democratisation and for the Sonderweg. Hans-Jürgen Puhle, professor at Frankfurt University, even held the Prussian regime to be "in the long term programmed for its own destruction". Other writers more orientated towards historicism such as Thomas Nipperdey underlined the divergence between the reformers' intentions and the unexpected later results of the reforms.
  Several decades ago, the Prussian reforms from 1807 to 1819 lost their central position in historical study of 19th-century Germany. One contributing factor to this decline is that the reforms in the states of the Confederation of the Rhine were considered as similar by several historians. Another is that the Prussian regions – dynamic in industry and society – belonged to the French sphere of influence directly or indirectly until the end of the Napoleonic era.
caption: Statue of Frederick William III of Prussia in the Heumarkt in Cologne, erected to the glory of Prussia – round its base are statues of the great Prussian reformers such as Stein, Hardenberg, Schön and Humboldt
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