ABSTRACT

The situation was exacerbated all over Germany especially in the 1830s and 1840s by the fact that Germany, like France and England, suffered from an excess of educated men without sufficient private means to support them. The Second Empire saw the steady growth both in the number of German civil servants and of their status in society. The state official in Wilhelmine Germany, even of bourgeois origin, was not likely to criticize a system which ensured him, along with the army officer, high social prestige, and which might well reward him, if successful, with a coveted decoration. Timidity and conformity gradually became characteristic of the Prussian bureaucrat where ten or twenty years ago he had seen himself as a progressive element in society, and, even if of bourgeois origin, a member of the social elite of his state. The Prussian government showed a certain subtlety in rewarding those who gave up political activity with position in the service.