the French are very industrious people who have made the towns in our country capable of producing manufactured goods, for fifty years ago no fine cloths, stockings, crepe, velvet or woollen goods were manufactured here, and we had to import these from England, France, the Netherlands, now our lands export considerable quantities all over Germany.38
The invitation to the refugees was one of the high points of Berlin history and has ever since been used to demonstrate Berlin’s credentials as a city of tolerance and freedom. Nevertheless this tolerance was not without ulterior motives. The Great Elector was genuinely concerned to protect Protestants in Europe, but the Edict of Potsdam was also motivated by both international and local politics. In 1670 Prussia had cemented an alliance with France; fifteen years later it was souring, not least because the elector was furious that Louis XIV had meddled in his Baltic policy against Sweden and feared that the French were planning an alliance with the new English Catholic king James II.39 The French attack on the Huguenots and his subsequent invitation to the refugees gave him an excuse to signal his displeasure to the French king. The edict also had important repercussions closer to home.
The Great Elector had long been troubled by the entrenched Lutheranism in Berlin and elsewhere and longed to convert the population to Calvinism. It was not an easy task. The conflict between Calvinists and Lutherans, which was based on doctrinal disagreements on the Lord’s supper and predestination, had wreaked havoc in many parts of Germany after the Reformation, when rulers from Saxony, Brandenburg, the Palatinate and elsewhere had lurched from Lutheranism to Calvinism. The two groups of clergy detested one another even more than they loathed the Catholics. The Lutheran Matthias Hoe von Hoënegg reflected this view in his 1601 pamphlet entitled A solid, just and orthodox detestation of Papists and Calvinists, which was followed in 1620 by A weighty (and in these dangerous times very necessary) discussion of whether and why it is better to have conformity with the Catholics … than with the Calvinists.40 Fights over religious succession were often bitter; a regent in the Palatinate was so desperate to ensure the province remained Calvinist that he locked the young Lutheran successor away in a lonely convent and tried to convert him; in Baden the regent stole his nephew from his dead brother’s wife and forced him to adopt his own religion. Berlin was at the centre of a similar conflict. The first of the Calvinist electors was Johann Sigismund, who had converted in 1613, and his successors remained faithful, swearing, ‘I am a Calvinist and with God’s help I shall die one.’ Berliners, however, remained devout Lutherans and were violently opposed to change. When the Great Elector took power the only Calvinist institutions in Berlin were the court and the cathedral, and when the first Calvinist preacher entered the city a Lutheran mob broke into his house, beat him up and stole everything but his green underwear – in which he was forced to preach the following Sunday. Thereafter the few Calvinists in Berlin were regularly attacked in the streets.41 If the elector could not convert Berliners peacefully he could do so by force of numbers, which could be bolstered by the refugees. As a result, when war broke out in Europe in 1672 and Catholic governments began to attack the entire Protestant community he invited them to Berlin, not only from France but also from the Palatinate, the upper Rhine and from Habsburg lands. They changed the religious balance in Berlin, and did so without bloodshed.
The townspeople were suspicious and even hostile to the large number of Calvinist refugees who suddenly appeared in their midst. The French spoke a strange language, wore strange clothing and followed a different religion; worse still, they were given tax breaks and financial assistance funded by the local population through forced collections like that of 20 January 1686, when ‘each and every citizen’ had to contribute to a fund of 14,000 thalers for the refugees.42 Despite later claims of ‘tolerance’ these Berliners did not welcome the newcomers with open arms; Muret decried the ‘Gehässigkeit’, the hateful behaviour of Berlin Lutherans towards the French, and it took generations for them to be accepted.43 In the end, however, the Huguenots became an integral part of the city. By 1690 the institutional autonomy of the Lutheran Church had crumbled and Calvinism had become the official religion in Berlin.
By the eighteenth century ‘tolerance’ had come to mean the freedom to practise religion without the kind of persecution seen in many parts of Europe at the time. This extended to many groups, including the Jews. Like other cities of the ancien régime Berlin was far from allowing complete emancipation of Jews but it was more liberal than many in Europe; it did not have a ghetto and had ceased to persecute and expel Jews.44 The Great Elector had invited a small number of ‘protected Jews’ into Brandenburg in 1650 and on 21 May 1671 issued an edict on the ‘Admission of Fifty Families of Protected Jews’, who were permitted to ‘keep open stalls and booths, to sell cloths and similar wares … to deal in new and old clothes, and further, to slaughter in their houses and to sell what is above their needs or forbidden to them by their religion, and finally to seek their subsistence in any place where they live’. The Jews were not permitted to have synagogues but could meet in one of their own houses as long as they conducted ceremonies ‘without giving offence to Christians’.45 The electoral edict of 1671 attracted many more families to Prussia from Poland and the Habsburg lands; wealthy Jewish families who had been expelled from Vienna in 1670 came to the city and formed the foundation of what was to become Berlin’s sophisticated German-Jewish sub-culture.46 Frederick the Great would improve their situation further in 1750 through the ‘Revised General Privilege and Regulation for the Jews in the Kingdom of Prussia’, under which they were given complete control of their own schools, synagogues and cemeteries and were to be tried in accordance with the tenets of Jewish law. Berlin was not tolerant in the twentieth-century sense but it became the most permissive of all Prussian towns and was, for a time, one of the most open-minded in Europe.47 Even so, some religions were excluded until the reign of Frederick the Great: in the Brandenburg Recess of 1653 Frederick William announced he would ‘not permit the practice of their religion, in public or private, to Papists, Arrians, Photinians, Weigalians, Anabaptists, and Minists’. He emphasized that his successors ‘must not tolerate Jesuits in your lands. They are devils who are capable of much evil and intrigue against you and the whole community’.48 Catholics continued to suffer under intolerant laws until well into the eighteenth century and even ‘protected Jews’ were subject to myriad regulations, special taxes and discrimination.
Irrespective of their shortcomings the Great Elector’s innovative policies were highly successful in creating a prosperous state out of the devastation of the Thirty Years War. The influx of skilled and talented refugees fired the Berlin economy and the city began to flourish. Increased trade and industry meant more revenue for the state, and to assist in administration and tax collection Frederick William created the General Kriegskommissariat (War Commission), a powerful new agency based on the French and Dutch models which formed the basis of a unified central state apparatus. It was the tentative beginning of Berlin’s role as the administrative centre of Prussia. In 1667 he introduced a detailed excise tax on virtually every product: home distilled brandy cost 6 groschen per quart, Rhenish and Polish brandy cost 9 groschen per quart, a fattened hog cost 3 groschen, a ton of salt 4. The revenue generated was ploughed back into the most distinctive feature of the new state, the army.
It had been clear from the beginning of his reign that Frederick William had intended to create a strong army but few had realized the extent of his plan. His army was not to be a mere fighting force; it was set to become the very foundation, the very essence of the Prussian state. The army would change Berlin for ever, influencing everything from its layout and architecture to its culture, its economy and its spirit. In the short term it helped to protect Prussia and made it an important power in European affairs. In the long term, the obsession with the military would prove disastrous.
In his Political Testament Frederick William wrote: ‘A ruler is of no consideration if he does not have adequate means and forces of his own; that alone has made me – thank God for it – a force to be reckoned with.’49 The experience of the Thirty Years War had taught him that although alliances were useful they could not be relied upon and it was this which determined his military policy. Unlike other German princes Frederick William