Frederick William IV and the Prussian monarchy

This is the first full-scale study in English of the reign of Frederick William IV, King of Prussia from 1840 to 1861, and arguably the most important German monarch in the century between the death of Frederick the Great and the accession of William II. Dismissed by others as a Romantic reactionary, Frederick William comes through in this study as a modern and 'successful' monarch.Not strictly a biography, the book also focuses on the structures, institutions, and transformations of the Prussian monarchial system during a time of revolutionary change. Through his analysis of the Prussian state, this work enriches our sense of the structures of the nineteenth-century European state, and of the elites who inhabited and adapted to these states.