ABSTRACT
Louis XVI, the last King of France to rule under the conditions of the ancient régime, came to the throne in 1774. He was guillotined rather less than twenty years later, and there is a danger of letting that tragedy and all that it symbolises influence unduly our judgment of the first fifteen years of the reign. We are apt to think that France engrossed the attention of Europe and that the atmosphere was heavy with the coming storm. But, in truth, the overmastering figure in the eyes of Europe was Frederick of Prussia. His wars were over and had left him and his state with a high reputation for discipline and success in war. The military and territorial ambitions of Prussia were, for the time, satisfied. The first partition of Poland, carried out in 1772 without the use of arms, had given more to Prussia than the long and tense struggle of the Seven Years’ War. When in 1778 a difficult question arose as to the succession in Bavaria, in which the interests of Austria and Prussia were at variance, the conflict was settled by negotiation. Frederick’s chief energies were now devoted to the promotion of commerce and industry, and to the building of the Prussian administrative system—autocratic, rigidly honest, and as efficient as any system can be that does not recognise the necessity of liberty. The new hopes of the age found a good deal of acceptance in Germany. Voltaire had been for some time a resident at the Court of King Frederick, and to Goethe and to Schiller and the thinkers of Germany the writers of France were a stimulus, sometimes to imitation and sometimes to opposition. But the Prussian king went on with his work, cynical and harsh in his manner and speech, but fundamentally in considerable sympathy with the new ideas.
