Friedrich Wilhelm II inherited 51 million Thalers in the treasury from Frederick the Great and took only eleven years to blow the lot. Nevertheless, Berlin blossomed under his reign. Friedrich Wilhelm II patronised the architect Carl Gotthard Langhans to build the enduring symbol of the city — the Brandenburg Gate. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a great proponent of the ‘Greek revival’, built new theatres, churches and grand fountains, in an attempt to create a ‘new Athens on the river Spree’, helping to turn Berlin into a centre of Romanticism.lxxxix
Friedrich was however not interested in, let alone prepared for, the monumental changes on the world stage that were about to flow from the French Revolution. France’s foreign policy objectives had not changed since the time of Louis XIV, and the ideals of the French Revolution were soon exposed as a thinly concealed attempt at further French expansion at the expense of the German states. Napoleon, like Louis XIV, dreamed that ‘France should achieve her natural frontiers’. These were obviously clear on her Atlantic coastline, and to some extent along the Pyrenees mountains in the south, but much more complex in the east and the north, where France was bordered by five countries. Added to these confrontational geographical objectives came Napoleon’s inability to tolerate any limits being set on his horizons. In a succession of conflicts, France occupied and annexed a range of additional territories, on which it had no legitimate claim. These included North Western Flanders from the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) centred on the area around Duynkerke (Dunkirk); the Italian provinces of Nice and Savoy, and the Rhine as her eastern frontier.
In 1789, Austria was busy in the Balkans fighting the Turks. The French Revolution caused national upheavals across her vast multiethnic empire from Belgium to Galacia to northern Italy and Hungary. However, the threat from France’s territorial ambitions, and the destabilising energies unleashed by the ideas of the revolution combined to once again unite Prussia and Austria against what they rightly perceived to be their greatest common enemy. In the Convention of Reichenbach of 1790 (in Bohemia) and the Treaty of Vienna in 1791, they both professed their counter-revolutionary credentials and rejected the French Revolution and its ‘illegitimate leaders’, whom they saw as posing a threat to all the monarchies of Europe. They formed the core of a counter-revolutionary axis. In the secret provisions of the Declaration of Pillnitz, Austria and Prussia not only planned for war with France, but also agreed to retake and divide Alsace-Lorraine among themselves.
The French Assembly replied in kind with moral outrage and declared war on Austria in April 1792. Troops from Austria and Prussia and a small contingent of French royalist troops blundered into eastern France. They were repulsed and the French Revolutionary Army quickly advanced. Prussia was again distracted from the conflict with France by the renewed crisis in Poland that was instigated by Russia and led to the Second Partition.xc Napoleon and his calls for ‘the continental hegemony of the ideals of the revolution in the name of humanity’,(1) prompted Friedrich Wilhelm II to quit his alliance with Austria in favour of consolidating his massive new Polish acquisitions and negotiating a peace and neutrality agreement with France. Napoleon’s terms were generous. Prussia would be allowed to greatly expand her sphere of influence yet again, this time to cover the new neutrality zone of northern Germany up to the Rhine and south to the river Main. But it came at a price. In 1795, at the Peace of Basel between Napoleon and Friedrich, the latter was manoeuvred into the tempting offer to take Hanover. This put him at odds, and ultimately at war, with England. The Treaty of Basel and the acquisition of Hanover effectively made Prussia an ally of France, although Friedrich still attempted to cling to the notion of Prussia’s neutrality.
The fear of the spread of the French Revolution and French expansionism was also hammering the final nails into the coffin of the Holy Roman Empire. Prussia was accused by German nationalists of abandoning Austria, her ‘natural’ ally, and the German cause in favour of her own narrow interests. Austria faced the same accusations when, after losing the fight against Napoleon in northern Italy, she conceded to French annexations in the Rhineland at the Peace of Campo Formio in October 1797. In the face of the might of Napoleon’s new Grande Armée and French territorial ambitions, the Austro-Prussian millennial bond with the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation collapsed into narrow self-interest. The empire was dead in all but name, and its emperor’s title was increasingly meaningless. German princes within the smaller states feared the fate of the empire would be the same as the Polish Commonwealth, namely to be carved up out of existence. Heinrich von Gagern, the chief minister of the tiny principality of Nassau wrote, ‘The German princes have so far found themselves in the double misfortune of wishing for a rapprochement between Prussia and Austria when they think of France and of fearing one when they think of Poland.’(3)
By 1803 Napoleon had rationalised his new German dominions and satellites; from over 2,000 principalities, imperial towns, cities and church states emerged just thirty-nine. German Europe faced a new geopolitical reality and the Holy Roman Empire was all but swept away. Most of the imperial cities and ecclesiastical principalities were gone, as was the Roman Catholic nature of the empire and its links to the Habsburgs. Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor of France with great pomp and circumstance at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The Holy Roman Emperor at the time, Franz II, realising that the title of ‘Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation’ now meant nothing, consolidated his own power base by declaring himself the hereditary Emperor of Austria and her domains, to secure himself a meaningful title over one that had become redundant. Declaring that there could be only one emperor in Europe, Napoleon insisted Franz II lay down his imperial crown and title. The Holy Roman Empire was finally declared dead in Vienna by an Imperial Herald on 6th August 1806.
With Friedrich Wilhelm II’s death in 1797, his successor, Friedrich Wilhelm III, clung to the same forlorn hope that Prussia could maintain her neutrality agreement and keep out of further conflict. Few Hohenzollern monarchs had, or would have, a greater revulsion for war than Friedrich Wilhelm III. The hope was forlorn because Napoleon heaped upon Friedrich one humiliation after the other, violating all the agreements he himself had cajoled Friedrich’s father into signing. First Napoleon got Prussia to take control of Hanover and come into conflict with her old ally England. Then he kidnapped a British diplomat from Hanover under the Prussian authorities’ noses, and then he offered to give Hanover back to the English crown. All this made a mockery of the so-called northern German neutrality zone, which was supposed to have become a Prussian sphere of influence. Napoleonic troops now violated the neutrality of the southern Hohenzollern provinces of Ansbach and Bayreuth on their way to defeat the combined Austrian and Russian armies at the Battle of Austerlitz. Friedrich Wilhelm III’s policy of neutrality came up against the increasing outrage of many ‘adopted’ Prussians working for the institutions of state. Men such as Baron vom und zum Stein from Hesse, also an ardent Anglophile, and Karl August von Hardenberg, originally from Hanover, along with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (the latter a Saxon), had, like many others, come to Prussia believing she was the only possible force for greater German integration. As more and more of German Europe came under the boot of Napoleonic France, they wanted Prussia to toss aside her humiliating neutrality, join forces with the alliance against France, and bring Napoleon to his knees. Many of them overestimated the power of the Prussian army, which had seen little modernisation since the Seven Years War half a century earlier.
As Hardenberg began to put out feelers to Russia and Saxony, there was open warfare in the Cabinet government at the court in Berlin between those for and those against joining the alliance against France. The hawks won the day, and in August 1806, Berlin declared war on France. The Russians were still a long way off and Prussia had to face the best and most modern army in Europe alone. The French deployed faster and better, wrong footing the Prussians who were still on the move towards their forward positions and who had yet to form up. The
French intercepted the bulk of the Prussian army at Jena, and Auerstedt, where they dealt the once-feared Prussian military two swift and decisive defeats. Napoleon made a brief stop at the Garrison Church in Potsdam to pay his respects at Frederick the Great’s tomb before moving on to take Berlin. Friedrich Wilhelm III fled to the furthest outpost of his domains, to Memel in East Prussia on the border with Russia.
The Russians finally arrived to confront Napoleon’s army in East Prussia at Eylau in freezing winter snowstorms where the armies could barely see each other; there, they fought each other to a bitter standstill. It is still disputed to this day who won the encounter. What matters is that it was the first time Napoleon had been checked on the battlefield. Napoleon then swiftly came to terms with the Russian Tsar at the Peace of Tilsit in East Prussia, in July 1807. It was a meeting to which Friedrich Wilhelm III was not invited, despite the fact that it took place on his own territory. He had to await whatever terms he was going to be offered. Napoleon had thought of effectively dissolving Prussia entirely and subjecting her to a fate not dissimilar to that of Poland. Poland on the other hand was briefly to be reconstituted out of the bulk of the territories Prussia had gained in the Second and Third Partitions. As Napoleon had reached peace terms with Russia he could do nothing to restore the two-thirds of the Polish Commonwealth that remained under the Tsar’s control. Napoleon’s motivations towards Poland were also inflamed by a new passion, his amorous affair with the very young and very beautiful Polish countess, Marie Walewska, who bore him a son and accompanied him on many of his campaigns.
Napoleon seemed clear in his strategy to do all that he could to permanently weaken Prussia and to relegate her again to the second tier of European states. He personally crowned the Elector of Saxony as King of Saxony, strengthening Prussia’s old rival for hegemony in northern Germany. While Prussia was left with her core territories intact — Brandenburg, East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and West Prussia — she was weakened by the large indemnity of 216.9 million Thalers that she was forced to pay. To give some indication of the scale of this, the total government revenue some ten years later in 1816, was only 31 million Thalers. The French army remained encamped in Prussia and stripped the land bare until the indemnity was settled in full. When Prussia struggled to pay it, Napoleon threatened to seize Silesia as ‘compensation’.(4) Prussia was left between a rock and a hard place; its army humiliated on the battlefield, the King’s best ministers (who had urged war upon him against his better judgment) in disgrace, territorially weakened and financially crippled by indemnity and occupation. Prussia was going to have to begin wholesale reforms and pray for a miracle to free her from what appeared to be permanent fealty to France. Those who claimed Prussia to be merely an army with a state, surely had to later question how this tenacious state managed to survive and reform itself to emerge stronger and more coherent from the disaster of 1806.
Frederick Wilhelm III began the long overdue process of the separation of powers, devolving power away from the centre and around his person in the old-fashioned court style system of European monarchy. He created the post of Staatskanzler that combined authority over Finance and Interior Affairs (effectively Prussia’s first Prime Minister) for Hardenberg in 1810. The establishment of five ministries with clear responsibilities and direct access to the King followed.(5) Most important of all were the reforms to the army intended to give Prussia some chance of regaining her independence.
In 1794, the Grande Armée had mobilised a staggering 1 million men. General conscription in France had put pressure on all governments in Europe to implement not only conscription but to raise more taxes to pay for it. Gerhard Johann Scharnhorst became the brains and Gebhard Blücher the brawn of the remodelled Prussian army. Prussia became the first modern army to create a General Staff to coordinate and plan all military affairs, rather than leave this in the hands of one supreme commander. Modern wars had become enormous unwieldy affairs involving hundreds of thousands of men across a hundred miles or more of single engagements. Supply, logistics and good engineers were now as important as the quality and training of the fighting men. General Scharnhost, as Chief of the Prussian General Staff, had been able to learn from the army’s mistakes as well as from von Clausewitz’s treatise On War, which stated that the longer you engage an enemy, the more time you have to adapt to and learn from his tactics. Scharnhorst thus began implementing the Napoleonic divisional system whilst simultaneously establishing a people’s militia army.
Scharnhorst’s adjutant was Gneisenau, who had been one of the few heroic figures of the 1806 war, when he defended and held the fortress city of Kolbergxci against overwhelming odds, until July 1807. The army was purged and only a quarter of its officer corps survived. Meritocracy in the ranks was also copied from the Napoleonic system, as were improvements in tactics, training and weaponry. The youngest of the military reformers, von Clausewitz, remains one of the most famous, whose On War is still compulsory reading at Sandhurst and West Point. Later German leaders would have done well to take on board his ideas; that war was not to be fought without end, but to serve a clearly defined political purpose. Bismarck made this the core of his Realpolitik. From 1806–14 Prussia also underwent a series of liberal reforms, many of which were initiated by the German nationalist, Freiherr vom Stein, and implemented by Karl August von Hardenberg. The two of them represented what was to become an internal conflict within Prussia. Hardenberg, while equally keen to be rid of the French, was less concerned with Stein’s German nationalism, and more a defender of Prussian interests. Despite their personal antipathy for one another, the two united to implement Imanuel Kant’s principle, ‘A person is free when he does not have to follow the commands of a person but of the law.’(6) They aimed at combining greater democratic principles with those of a state monarchy; in other words they wanted to create a true constitutional monarchy more along English lines.
The reform process began in 1807 with the implementation of measures for the greater liberalisation of trade and the emancipation of those peasants still subject to their lords. The number of free and non-subject tenants had been on the increase since the 1740s. Nearly a quarter of the peasants in East Prussia were free descendents of those who had come as settlers with the Order and were in fact better off than many other farmers in Europe, let alone in other parts of German Europe.(7) However, the liberally-minded reform produced mixed results. It was primarily successful in freeing those peasants tied to state lands but was largely perceived to be a failure in relation to those released from nobles’ estates, as this broke centuries of mutual obligations and created widespread recriminations and resentments. Peasants were often not able to maintain their land, especially in hard times and this accelerated the flight from the land to the cities. In addition to the emancipation reforms in 1808 Prussia introduced tiered administrative reform to give the regions, cities and towns greater power in running their own affairs regulating a long and cherished tradition of federalism that continues to this day in modern Germany. However, the nobility kept power at village level, and the responsibility for local schools, churches, local bylaws and of course their favourite privilege, hunting.
Wilhelm von Humboldt expanded and modernised the school system, creating the renowned academic secondary schools known as Gymnasien and establishing technical institutes (Technische Hochschulen) which were soon the envy of the world. Under his auspices, the educational system received considerable additional funding which soon almost matched the spending on the army. Humboldt also founded the University of Berlin — later renamed Humboldt University in his honour — which was housed in the former palace of Prince Henry, Frederick the Great’s younger brother, on the main avenue of Unter den Linden. At the time, the philosopher Friedrich Hegel wrote, ‘Prussia is the embodiment of the force of liberating world reason.’ He compared Prussia to France, where Napoleon was stifling all individual freedom of expression and expounding on his megalomaniacal visions for Europe. Hegel elevated Prussia
to a metaphysical philosophical plain, a state perfect of its time in the same way that classical Greece and Republican Rome had been of theirs.
A raft of reforms had modernised the Prussian state, its institutions and its military;xcii all that was required now was an opportunity to put these reforms to good use. This presented itself with Napoleon’s disastrous war against Russia. Reaching Moscow by the summer of 1812, he went into full retreat and was back at Prussia’s border with Russia by Christmas. In a rare act of insubordination on the part of a Prussian General, that would again force a reluctant king’s hand, General Yorck von Wartenburg unilaterally pulled his Prussian troops out of the enforced alliance with France on 30th December 1812, and came to terms with the Russians.
Napoleon’s occupations had been savage. When the remnants of the once great Grande Armée crossed back into East Prussia, its men stripped the land bare of food, requisitioning everything they could by force, which led to mass starvation. Simmering rage poured over into violent hatred, with peasants picking off scavenging soldiers and beating them to death, and local militias seeking revenge wherever they could.
The Austrian Emperor wanted to mobilise popular German resentment across the territories occupied by France and called upon Germans in all states to rise up against the French.(8) Tiroleans were the first do so against the Bavarians who had been given Tirol at Austria’s expense as part of Napoleon’s divide and conquer strategy. Saxons, Westphalians and even Prussians had been conscripted to fight with Napoleon’s army in Russia. Now these troops began to switch sides. In early 1813, Silesia became the headquarters for the political and military preparation against Napoleon where Blücher was put in charge of the Silesian army. In February of that same year, after a treaty had been signed between the Russian Tsar and the Prussian King in Breslau,xciii both sides agreed to follow the Austrians’ example and try to mobilise popular support and uprisings against Napoleon throughout German-speaking Europe. Then, they went further — both pledging support for a united Germany.(9) Freiherr vom Stein, who with many other Prussians had first taken refuge in Prague after the debacle of 1806, and later joined forces with the Russian Tsar to defeat Napoleon, was now put in charge of a committee for the recruitment of troops from across Germany.
Death of a Nation Page 25
