The Prussian Theory of Monarchy

Abstract

During the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when absolute monarchy was the prevailing governmental type in Europe, the principle was very generally held by the rulers, and not infrequently acted upon, that the people of a state, together with their lands and other goods and chattels, were, in a very real sense, the property of their king and constituted his patrimonium. That this view should have prevailed, is historically explainable. The entire feudal system, out of which the modern monarchy had evolved, was founded upon the idea that the ownership of land carried with it, as one of its incidents, the right of political rulership. When, then, by a process of development, the king had obtained a supremacy over his feudal lords, when his “peace” had become higher than theirs, and had extended over the whole country, and when these lords and those who in turn held of them were forced to concede that they held their lands by a conditional grant from the king, their liege lord, the idea that the monarch was the owner of the entire realm was complete. In him lay the final legal title to all land. All other persons had “tenures” rather than rights of ownership. And, as for the people themselves, the idea that one person might be another person's “man” or “woman” was universal. The influence of these ideas on recent political conceptions may be indicated by recalling that serfdom did not disappear from Germany until well into the nineteenth century.This patrimonial conception of monarchy explains the accepted idea that the throne might be inherited, or willed away by testament, like a piece of property, and that it might be bought and sold, and acquired by marriage. It explains also the recognized right of the king to requisition, upon occasion, the goods of his subjects, and even to sell those subjects themselves to foreign powers, as, for example, was done when the Hessian soldiers were sold by their ruler to England for use against the Americans in the Revolutionary War.