6 - The 1848 Revolution in Prussia: a Financial Interpretation

Summary

When it comes to revolutions, the gold standard is 1789 in France. By that measure the events in 1848 have been found wanting, the farce to 1789's tragedy. But should all the revolutions that year be tarred with the same brush? True, the issues at stake were the same in Berlin as in Paris: how to help the unemployed while ensuring that taxpayers were not abused. What differed was the Prussian solution, which was as bloodless it was enduring. The roots of British state power in the nineteenth century have been traced by Martin Daunton to its gradual cultivation of taxpayer and creditor trust. The roots of Prussian state power resulted from a much shorter but similarly effective process, one called the 1848 revolution.

Before the revolution: social issues

By the 1840s social pressures were mounting in Prussia. Its population had grown by 58 per cent between 1816 and 1849. With landownership relatively immobile, the landless labouring class swelled and the number of artisanal Handwerker grew by 133 per cent. This left a large group of Prussians vulnerable to crop and economic failure. In 1845 and 1846 potato blight and a disastrous harvest led to food prices doubling and more. The result was food riots: in Prussia 158 such riots occurred in April–May 1847 alone. Famine was averted by the bountiful harvest of 1847, but the resultant squeeze on discretionary income caused a deep recession and credit crisis.

With unemployment rising sharply, welfare was pressing. But who bore responsibility for poor relief? Prussia's Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794 had acknowledged the state's duties. But this was a contingent responsibility, for in the first instance the local community and in the second, wealthy locals were liable. Even before the crisis, the costs of providing for the growing class of poor had been mounting. After 1846 the local communes struggled to meet their obligations. In Berlin, for instance, the population doubled between 1830 and 1851, but poor relief increased threefold, swallowing nearly 40 per cent of Berlin's budget in 1847. That March commentators such as Koenig worried about relying on the wealthier, for ‘nest-eggs have been consumed’. Increasing recourse to the central state was the result. Historians (and some contemporaries) have lamented Prussia's dilatory response to the welfare problem as reflecting dogmatic laissez faire principles.