Karl, Reichsfreiherr vom und zum Stein

Karl, Reichsfreiherr vom und zum Stein (born Oct. 26, 1757, Nassau an der Lahn, Nassau [Germany]—died June 29, 1831, Schloss Cappenberg, Westphalia [Germany]) was a Rhinelander-born Prussian statesman, chief minister of Prussia (1807–08), and personal counselor to the Russian tsar Alexander I (1812–15). He sponsored widespread reforms in Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars and influenced the formation of the last European coalition against Napoleon.

Childhood and youth.

Stein was born into a family of the imperial nobility. His father, although a Protestant, was chamberlain to the Catholic elector and archbishop of Mainz. Karl Stein’s ancestral tradition, as he himself declared, imbued him with “ideas of piety, patriotism, class and family honour, and the duty of devoting one’s life to the community’s needs and of acquiring the necessary proficiency for such purposes by diligence and effort.” He grew up to feel a strong attachment to the old German Reich and to the imperial dynasty of the Habsburgs and a fervent German patriotism.

His parents wished him to become a judge at one of the imperial courts of the old German empire, and in 1773 he was accordingly sent to study law at the University of Göttingen. Stein studied not only law but statistics, economics, and history as well. From his readings in early German history, in English literature and constitutional theory, and in the works of Montesquieu, he received impressions that were to be of significance for his later activity as a statesman.

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Influence of August Rehberg.

August Wilhelm Rehberg, whom he met in Göttingen, became a close friend and exercised a greater influence on Stein than did any of his academic teachers. Rehberg was a political thinker who advocated a liberal–conservative policy to preserve the old where it had proved itself and to make reforms where conditions demanded them. It was in the constant exchange of ideas with Rehberg that Stein developed his own reform ideas in the quarter century between 1775 and 1800. He attempted to find a middle way between revolution and absolutism that could unite tradition and progress.

In 1777 Stein left the university and used the next three years to study the legal procedures of the institutional organs of the Reich, namely the Imperial Chamber at Wetzlar, the Imperial Court Council in Vienna, and the Reichstag, or Diet, of the empire at Regensburg. In the course of his work he decided against joining the imperial service and to enter the Prussian civil administration instead. In 1780, through his friendship with Friedrich Anton von Heinitz, the Prussian minister of mines, he obtained a suitable post.

Career as Prussian civil servant.

Stein began his career in the department of mines and factories, at first stationed for some years in Berlin, then for a long period in Prussian Westphalia. His work in the direction of mining enterprises and in the provincial administration of Westphalia made Stein an expert in the practical detail of local government. In 1796 he was appointed head of all the Rhenish and Westphalian administrative districts; and in 1802–03 he was entrusted with the administrative execution of the merging of the secularized bishoprics of Münster and Paderborn into the Prussian state. In his work as an administrator, Stein was content and highly successful: he improved the road network, made the rivers navigable, promoted textile production, and reformed the system of tax collection.

In 1793 he married the countess Wilhelmine Wallmoden. She was the daughter of a Hanoverian general and a granddaughter of England’s king George II, through one of his mistresses, the Countess of Yarmouth. During the first years of their marriage, Stein felt that his wife did not appreciate his way of life and his goals. As the years passed, however, he became increasingly respectful of his wife’s character and abilities. Together they devoted themselves to the education of their two daughters. During Stein’s long periods of separation from his family in the years 1807–15, his wife took care of his estates, executed his commissions, and brought up the children. Stein outlived her by 12 years.

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Achievements as minister and prime minister.

On Oct. 27, 1804, Stein was summoned to Berlin to be minister for manufactures and excise (i.e., for economic affairs). In this capacity he obtained an insight into the working of the central offices of the government, which moreover convinced him of the need for reform. Because of a momentary altercation with King Frederick William III, who rejected his demands for a ministerial system free of interference from the king’s personal Cabinet, Stein was dismissed from office on Jan. 3, 1807, in the interval between the defeat of the Prussians by the French at Jena and Auerstädt (October 1806) and the Peace of Tilsit (July 1807).

Returning to his ancestral castle in March 1807, Stein used his enforced leisure to compose the now famous Nassau Memorandum (Nassauer Denkschrift). A comprehensive program for the reform of the Prussian state, this memorandum constitutes the best and most reliable account of Stein’s ideas. His basic principle is that, for a healthy and efficient state, an organic relationship must be established between population and government and that citizens must be brought into responsible participation in the state’s affairs. This perspective had long been developed, formulated, and modified in his mind through his preoccupation with the English system of self-government, and experience had further enriched and reinforced it. Seeking to give new life to the state from within, Stein hoped that the practice of self-government would generate “civic-mindedness” (Bürgersinn) and “community spirit” (Gemeingeist) in the populace, so that they would adopt the state’s interests as their own.

Under the Peace of Tilsit, which mutilated the Prussian state, Frederick William III had to dismiss his minister Karl von Hardenberg at Napoleon’s behest. He then invited Stein to be his chief minister, on Napoleon’s recommendation. Stein arrived at Memel on Sept. 30, 1807, and after interviews with the King his new appointment was confirmed (October 4). Confronted with the extraordinary situation of Prussia, the single-minded, uncompromising, and self-confident Stein saw the opportunity for fundamental reform. The old system of the state was quite obviously discredited; even the otherwise irresolute King could see that it was high time to put Prussia on a more up-to-date footing. Furthermore, Napoleon’s demands on Prussia themselves necessitated incisive measures affecting the internal system. Last but not least, some of the liberally inclined members of the bureaucracy were ready to collaborate with Stein.

Thus, from the earliest days of his tenure of office, Stein could launch his reform. On Oct. 9, 1807, a law was published “concerning the Emancipated Possession and the Free Use of Landed Property as well as the Personal Relationships of the Inhabitants,” which freed the peasants from servitude. Though it did not furnish a satisfactory solution to a number of problems (foremost among them being that of the gradual transfer of economically exploited land to peasant ownership), this October Edict was a decisive step in the conversion of Prussia to civil liberty and to equality before the law. No less revolutionary were the economic implications: land, which nobles had been forbidden to sell to nonnobles, could henceforth be bought and sold freely, and men were free to follow the vocation of their own choosing.

Stein’s Municipal Ordinance (Städteordnung) of Nov. 19, 1808, was of lasting importance. It introduced self-government for the urban communes, created the distinction between the salaried executive officials (mayor and magistrate) and the town councils, and so enabled the towns to deal with their local affairs largely through their own citizenry. Even so, the greater towns were put under the supervision of a police president directly responsible to the minister of the interior. Stein’s ordinance pointed the way to the development of municipal life throughout Germany.

Stein effectively modernized the structure of the Prussian government as a whole. The irresponsible advisers of the absolute king, namely the so-called Cabinet councillors, who had hitherto formed a sort of secret government behind the scenes, were discarded and so also was the “General Directory,” which had been set up as the central authority in Frederick William I’s reign. In its place Stein established departmental ministries (foreign affairs, internal affairs, finance, justice, and war) with unified competence for the whole Prussian territory. On the same principle he organized the activities of the intermediate administrations (Regierungen) and created the post of Oberpräsident, or official head of a whole province, directly responsible for it to the central government. Stein pursued his many-sided tasks with passionate determination, but much of his plan remained unexecuted. His schemes for agrarian and economic reform were taken up by Hardenberg from 1810 onward; but the latter applied them in a spirit more akin to that of the Enlightenment than to Stein’s conservative sort of liberalism and without Stein’s educative, ethicopolitical concern.