Frederick William IV, the eldest son and successor of Frederick William III of
Prussia, reigned as King of Prussia from 1840 to 1861. Also referred to as the
"romanticist on the throne", he is best remembered for the many buildings he had
constructed in Berlin and Potsdam, as well as for the completion of the Gothic
Cologne cathedral. In politics, he was a conservative, and in 1849 rejected the
title of Emperor of the Germans offered by the Frankfurt Parliament as not the
Parliament's to give. In 1857, he suffered a stroke, and was left
incapacitated, until his death. Early life
Frederick William was educated by private tutors, many of whom were
experienced civil servants, such as Friedrich Ancillon. He also gained
military experience by serving in the Prussian Army during the War of
Liberation against Napoleon in 1814, although he was an indifferent soldier.
He was a draftsman interested in both architecture and landscape gardening and
was a patron of several great German artists, including the architect Karl
Friedrich Schinkel and the composer Felix Mendelssohn. In 1823 he married
Elisabeth Ludovika of Bavaria. Since she was a Roman Catholic, the preparations
for this marriage included difficult negotiations which ended with her
conversion to Lutheranism. There were two wedding ceremonies—one in Munich,
and another in Berlin. Although it was a very harmonious marriage, the couple had
no children. Frederick William was a staunch
Romanticist, and his devotion to this movement, which in the German States
featured a nostalgia for the Middle Ages, was largely responsible for his
developing into a conservative at an early age. In 1815, when he was only
twenty, the crown prince exerted his influence to structure the proposed new
constitution of 1815, which was never actually enacted, in such a way that the
landed aristocracy would hold the greatest power. He was firmly against
the liberalization of Germany and only aspired to unify its many states within
what he viewed as a historically legitimate framework, inspired by the
ancient laws and customs of the recently dissolved Holy Roman Empire. As such,
Frederick William opposed the idea of a unified German state, believing that
Austria was divinely ordained to rule over Germany and contenting himself with
the title of "Grand General of the Realm".
Reign Frederick William became King of Prussia
on the death of his father in 1840. Through a personal union, he also became
the sovereign prince of the Principality of Neuchâtel, today part of Switzerland.
In 1842, he gave his father's menagerie at Pfaueninsel to the new Berlin Zoo,
which opened its gates in 1844 as the first of its kind in Germany. Other
projects during his reign—often involving his close collaboration with
the architects—included the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Neues Museum in
Berlin, the Orangerieschloss at Potsdam as well as the reconstruction of Schloss
Stolzenfels on the Rhine and Burg Hohenzollern, in the ancestral homelands
of the dynasty which became part of Prussia in 1850.
Although a staunch conservative, Frederick William did not seek to be a
despot, and so he toned down the reactionary policies pursued by his
father, easing press censorship and promising to enact a constitution at
some point, but he refused to create an elected legislative assembly, preferring
to work with the nobility through "united committees" of the provincial
estates. Despite being a devout Lutheran, his Romantic leanings led him
to settle the Cologne church conflict by releasing the imprisoned Clemens August
von Droste-Vischering, the Archbishop of Cologne. He also patronized further
construction of Cologne Cathedral, Cologne having become part of Prussia in
1815. In 1844, he attended the celebrations marking the completion of
the cathedral, becoming the first king of Prussia to enter a Roman Catholic
building. When he finally called a national assembly in 1847, it was not a
representative body, but rather a United Diet comprising all the provincial
estates, which had the right to levy taxes and take out loans, but no right
to meet at regular intervals. When revolution broke out in Prussia in
March 1848, part of the larger series of Revolutions of 1848, the king initially
moved to repress it with the army, but on 19 March he decided to recall the
troops and place himself at the head of the movement. He committed himself to
German unification, formed a liberal government, convened a national
assembly, and ordered that a constitution be drawn up. Once his
position was more secure again, however, he quickly had the army reoccupy Berlin
and in December dissolved the assembly. He did, however, remain dedicated to
unification for a time, leading the Frankfurt Parliament to offer him the
crown of Germany on 3 April 1849, which he refused, purportedly saying that he
would not accept "a crown from the gutter". The King's refusal was rooted
in his Romantic aspiration to re-establish the medieval Holy Roman
Empire, comprising smaller, semi-sovereign monarchies under the
limited authority of a Habsburg emperor. Therefore, Frederick William would only
accept the imperial crown after being elected by the German princes, as per
the former empire's ancient customs. He expressed this sentiment in a letter to
his sister the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia, in which he said
the Frankfurt Parliament had overlooked that "in order to give, you would first
of all have to be in possession of something that can be given." In the
king's eyes, only a reconstituted College of Electors could possess such
authority. With the failed attempt by the Frankfurt Parliament to include the
Habsburgs into a newly unified German Empire, the Parliament turned to
Prussia. Seeing Austrian ambivalence towards Prussia taking a more powerful
role in German affairs, Frederick William began considering a Prussian-led
union. All German states, excluding those of the Habsburgs, would be unified
under Hohenzollern authority, and these two polities would be linked in an
overarching political framework. Frederick William, therefore, did
attempt to establish the Erfurt Union, a union of the German states except for
Austria, but abandoned the idea by the Punctation of Olmütz on 29 November
1850, in the face of renewed Austrian and Russian resistance. The German
Confederation remained the common government of German Europe.
Rather than returning to bureaucratic rule after dismissing the Prussian
National Assembly, Frederick William promulgated a new constitution that
created a Parliament of Prussia with two chambers, an aristocratic upper house
and an elected lower house. The lower house was elected by all taxpayers, but
in a three-tiered system based on the amount of taxes paid, so that true
universal suffrage was denied. The constitution also reserved to the king
the power of appointing all ministers, reestablished the conservative district
assemblies and provincial diets, and guaranteed that the civil service and
the military remained firmly in the hands of the king. This was a more
liberal system than had existed in Prussia before 1848, but it was still a
conservative system of government in which the monarch, the aristocracy, and
the military retained most of the power. This constitution remained in effect
until the dissolution of the Prussian kingdom in 1918.
Later years and death Following the revolutions of 1848, the
increasingly gloomy king withdrew from the public eye, surrounding himself with
advisers who preached absolute orthodoxy and conservatism in religious and
political matters. A stroke in 1857 left the king partially paralyzed and largely
mentally incapacitated, and his brother William served as regent from 1858 until
the king's death in 1861, at which point the regent acceded to the throne himself
as William I of Prussia. Frederick William IV is buried with his
wife in the crypt underneath the Church of Peace in the park of Sanssouci, at
Potsdam. Ancestry
Notes References
Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy 1840-1862, by David E.
Barclay,. Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of
Prussia, 1600-1947, by Christopher Clark,.
External links Texts on Wikisource:
"Frederick William IV, king of Prussia". Encyclopædia Britannica. 1911.
"Frederick William IV.". New International Encyclopedia. 1906.