Impressive as the Austerlitz campaign had been,
Napoleon’s most spectacularly crushing victory came a year later, against a
different enemy. His defeat of Prussia
in 1806 not only eerily foreshadowed the total wars of the twentieth century
but also helped bring them about, by lighting the torch of German resentment
that would take 140 years to burn out. The philosopher Hegel, who saw the
events at rather too close a remove, considered them the hinge on which the
history of the world had turned. ‘The connecting bonds of the world are
dissolved and have collapsed like images in a dream,’ he wrote even before the
end of the campaign. He called Napoleon, whom he saw riding near his home in
Jena, nothing less than ‘the world soul . . .who, sitting astride his horse,
reaches across the world and dominates it.’
Prussia had not fought France for more than a decade. Its young, insecure King
Friedrich Wilhelm III had distressing personal memories of Valmy* and had
preferred to turn his attention to the east. Since the final partition of Poland
in 1795, its richest territories had lain, half digested, in the maw of the
Prussian state (nearly 90% of present day Poland belonged to it). So the
Prussians initially had no particular desire to challenge Napoleon. They even
entered into a brief alliance with him, prompting an abortive declaration of
war against them by Britain. But in the summer of 1806, anxieties about
Napoleon’s activities on their western borders led the king to switch sides and
enter into a new, ‘Fourth Coalition,’ which also included Russia and Britain.
It was a disastrous mistake. The Prussian army still lived, too far to an
extent, on the legend of Frederick the Great. Indeed, too many of its generals
had personal memories of his days of glory, fifty years before (the historian
Gordon once quipped: ‘it seemed literally true that in Prussia, old soldiers
never died).’ The ponderous old Duke of Brunswick who had lost the battle of
Valmy, remained the kingdom’s highest commander .Friedrich Wilhelm’ army of
235,000 was large and relatively well trained- but only by the standards of the
Old Regime. Composed in large part of unwilling peasants, mercenaries, and
former prisoners of war, held together by traditionally savage Prussian
discipline, it continued to use its conventional order of battle, despite the
new tactics Napoleon had perfected.
In late August, not waiting for Russian reinforcements, the Prussians gave
Napoleon an ultimatum to withdraw his army beyond the Rhine or fight. In
response, Napoleon took part of the Grande
Armee, already in Germany, and formed it into a powerful square of 180,000
men – the so-called bataillion carre
– which allowed him to concentrate a huge force quickly on a decisive point. On
October 14, it engaged the Prussians in the twin battles of Jena and Auerstadt. Like so many
battles, they began with a comedy of error. As dawn broke, Napoleon, commanding
a concentrated detachment of 46,000 on strategic heights near Jena (where Hegel
had glimpsed him the day before), found himself facing some 38,000 Prussians
under the sixty-year-old Prince of Hohenlohe. Taking them for Brunswick’s main
force, he quickly summoned reinforcements and by noon had 96,000 men available.
Hohenlohe stood no chance against such numbers and compounded his defeat by
stubbornly keeping 20,000 infantry standing exposed, in the line, as if they
were fighting the Seven Years’ War, under merciless fire from French
skirmishers hiding behind garden walls. By the end of the day, the French had
killed 10,000 of his men and wounded another 15,000. Meanwhile, nearby,
Brunswick ha been engaged in a characteristic maneuver –withdrawal- but
blundered into a French corps under Marshal Loid Davout. In a desperate,
brilliant action, Devout beat the larger Prussian force. Brunswick himself fell
mortally wounded, and the battles left the Prussian military shattered beyond
repair.
But the French triumph did not end there, for Napoleon’s forces relentlessly
pursued the Prussians. On October 16, Erfurt fell to Marshal Murat, with 6,000
men taken prisoner; the next day, Halle surrendered to Marshal Bernadotte. One
by one, the remaining Prussian fortresses passed into French hands, often without
offering even token resistance: Hamelin, Plassenburg, Stertin, Spandau,
Magdeburg. In early November Napoleon marched triumphantly into Berlin,
displaying prisoners from Friedrich Wilhelm’s Noble Guard. The king himself had
fled to East Prussia. Of the 170,000 soldiers that he had sent against Napoleon
at the end of the summer, he had loss no less than 96%: 25,000 dead or wounded
and 140,000 prisoners.. Napoleon, meanwhile, issued a bulletin declaring that
the defeat of Rossbach- France’s epic loss to Frederick the Great in 1757- had
been ‘expunged’. He also paid a visit to Frederick himself, in his tomb at Potsdam.
“He stopped at the entrance to the grave, meditative attitude,’ his aide Segur
recalled. ‘He remained there nearly ten minutes, motionless and silent.’ Then
he left, although not without helping himself to Fredericks sword, sash, and
Black Eagle decoration, for display in Paris. As the future military strategist
Clausewitz, and eyewitness to the campaign, would later wrote, the Prussian army
had been ruined ‘more completely than any army has ever been ruined on the
battlefield.
Despite the epochal defeat, the conflict dragged on for another eight months.
The Russians had not yet come to terms, and in February 1807, Napoleon fought
the remaining Prussians in a ghastly battle of Eylau in Poland, under blinding,
stinging snow, without a significant result. But in June, Napoleon crushed the
Russians at the battle of Friedland and a month later met Tsar Alexander on a
raft in the middle of the Nieman River near Tilsit, at the Russian frontier. In
keeping with his monarchical pretensions, Napoleon called the young Russian
monarch his ‘brother,’ pledged to treat him as an equal, and seduced him into
an alliance. He forced Friedrich Wilhelm to wait on the shore like a naughty
child, and the subsequent treaty reduced Prussia to the status of a second-rate power.
It lost fully half of its territory and subjects (from 10 million to 4.6) was forced
to pay massive reparations, saw its army reduced to a token force of 42,000,
and as a result of all this, suffered economic collapse.
In modern European history, only one campaign compares with Napoleon’s defeat
of Prussia for its sheer, overwhelming speed and force: Hitler’s conquest of
France in the spring of 1940, Both took less than six weeks (Napoleon’s, at
thirty-three days, was faster, despite his lack of tanks). Both destroyed the adversaries’
morale, as well as their physical ability to resist. Both ended with an entire
army taken prisoner. At the cessation of
hostilities, both losing powers had territory amputated as revenge for an
earlier defeat –Hitler famously forcing the French to sign the armistice in the
same railroad car where the Germans had surrendered at the end of WWI. Even
Napoleon’s visit to Fredrick ‘s tomb foreshadowed the visit that a pensive,
silent Hitler would pay in 1940 to the Invalids, and the tomb of Napoleon
himself. In other words, 1806 was a blitzkrieg. And just like the blitzkrieg of
1940, it left Great Britain alone in the fight:
Another year! Another deadly blow!
Another mighty Empire overthrown!
And we are left, or shall be left, alone;
The
last that dare to struggle with the Foe.
Thus wrote William Wordsworth in November 1806.
The keenest observer of the campaign, however, was Clausewitz. This product of
minor Prussian nobility, then just twenty-six, had already spent half his life
in uniform. He was a serious, hardworking man dedicated to the Prussian army,
so its massive failure struck him hard both personally (he spent two years as a
prisoner in France) and philosophically. And over the next few years, shock
congealed into furor, as he watched King Fredrick Wilhelm meekly follow
Napoleon’s dictates Finally, in 1812, Clausewitz committed the ultimate
apostasy for an officer, abandoning his country in wartime and pledging himself
to the Russians, who were now at war with France again. In a passionate
justification of his act, which amounted to a military profession of faith, he
bitterly denounced not only his own ‘dishonored’ government but also, the style
of war at which it had once excelled:
Formerly . . . war was waged in a way
that a pair of duelists carried on their pedantic struggle. One battled with
moderation and consideration according to the conventional proprieties . . .War
was caused by nothing more than diplomatic caprice, and the spirit of the thing
could hardly prevail over the goal of military honor . . .There is no more talk
of this sort of war, and one would have to be blind not to be able to perceive
the difference with our wars, that is to say the wars that our age and
conditions require . . .The war of the present time is war of all against all.
It is not a King that wars on a king, not an army which wars on an army ,but a
people which wars on another, and the king and the army are contained in the people.
War
will only lose this character with much difficulty, and, in truth, the return
of that old, bloody, yet often boring chess game of soldiers fighting is not to
be desired.
The
passage brilliantly encapsulated the changes that had taken place in war since 1793, while foreshadowing
Clausewitz’s great work On War. He
now saw the old aristocratic conventions as mere frippery and artifice that
distorted the true, natural course of war. That true and natural course
involved the commitment of every possible resource and all possible violence of
the sort France had inflicted on his fatherland. No wonder that he quotes
Thomas Hobbes’s famous phrase. It felt like war of all against all, indeed . .
.
During what Germans later called this (1814) ‘war of liberation’, an
enthusiasm for war as a redemptive,
regenerative experience, previously only found in the writings of a few
intellectuals, such as Humboldt and Gentz, came to pervade German elite
culture. Many of the best-known literary figures of te day – Ernst Moritz
Arndt, Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Theodor Korner – praised
the ongoing struggle as a joyous test of German spirit, through which a divided
and lethargic nation would awaken and grow in health and strength. They
compared the event to an earlier such awakening – the revolt of the German
tribes against the Romans, led by Rome’s supposedly Arminius (Hermann). Kleist
made Hermann the subject of a play that he hoped would spur his fellow
countrymen to national unity and the extermination of the enemy: ‘For the whole
world will only achieve peace from this wolf’s brood when the robber nest is
completely destroyed and nothing but a black flag waves from its desolate heap of
ruins.” Arndt, a prolific poet, historian, and former cleric ,sounded the same
theme of national awakening:
What is the German’s Fatherland? . . .
As far as the German tongue sounds
And God in Heaven sings songs
That is what it should be!
It should be all of Germany!
This poem, one of the most popular of
the period, practically became a national anthem, six decades before the actual
achievement of German unity.
These writers also had a very clear idea of what shape the war should take. It
should be a ‘people’s war’ involving the entire population. Yet just in the case of the Girondins and the sans-cullottes, their fantasy of total engagement involved
anything autonomous, mechanized destruction on a mass scale. To the contrary, it
involved a return to the elemental forms of combat, in which individual strength,
virtue, and passion would decide the outcome- ‘To arms, To arms! Kleist wrote
in verses meant to be sng –rather horrifyingly- to Beethoven’s melody for ‘Ode
to Joy. ‘With a club and a staff . . .Strike him dead! The world’s court of
judgment won’t ask you for reasons!’
In an irony the French would not have appreciated, yet German’s saw two recent
events in particular as exemplars of such noble and primitive war: the Vendee
and Spain. Clausewitz cited both to prove that if an entire population rose up,
the worse tyranny could not prevail against it. Even though the ’tiger’ of the French Republic had passed
through the Vendee ‘with the sword of devastation, with murder and flame,’ it
had not subdued it. The survivors of Turreau’s columns might not have given
such a sanguine account of their sanguinary experience, but by 1812, a new
legend of the Vendee had arisen, in which the destruction figured less
prominently than the rebels tenacious heroism. After the start of the Spanish
guerilla war, with its obvious resemblances to the Vendee, the Germans
integrated it into their story as well. Kleist wrote anode to Palafox, the hero
of Saragossa, and adapted a Spanish national ‘catechism’ to the German context.
Carl Schmitt would later write: ‘The spark that flew north from Spain in 1808
found theoretical form in Berlin.’
A peoples’ war also involved intense hatred of the enemy, and the intellectuals
surpassed even the Jacobins of the Year II in their lust to stimulate it. Arndt
in particular provided, in his prolific xenophobic invective, an unsavory foretaste of some of
Germany’s worst subsequent history. Justas Barere had insisted that French infants
suck in Anglophobia with their mother’s milk, Arndt demanded that German
children learn hatred of the French in the cradle. He called France ‘an empty, hollow,
doll-like formless, contentless Nothing, lacking strength, meaning and character.’
Identifying Germanys present enemies and future victims, he said they were ‘refined, bad Jews’, ‘’A Jew
people.’ Just as revoltingly, in 1813, he published at tract with the charming
title On National Hatred, because he thought
the overall phenomena deserved encouragement. ‘Since He is the God of love, so
hated pleases him too,’ This former cleric
wrote with an impressive lack of logic. “All nature lives and creates solely through
eternal war and struggle . . . God created . . . enmity between the nations.’ And
therefore: ‘I want hate against the French, not just for this war, but for
along time, forever . . . This hatred glows as thee religion of the German
people, as a holy mania in every heart.’ Here were the logical consequences of
Humboldt’s dispassionate reflections on language and organic growth, placed in
the context of real warfare. Arndt expressed it with egregious vulgarity ,but
overall, he was not untypical (Incidentally, the north German university attended
by this paragon of learning and toleration was renamed for him the year Hitler
took power and still bears his name today.)
In early 1813, Prussia’s rulers began to take measures to translate this
bellicose rhetoric into action . . .but despite all tye talk of Spain and the
Vendee, the Prussian territory in fact saw very little partisan activity in the
summer of 1813 – the war remained a duel of uniformed armies. The patriotic
enthusiasm did prompt more than twenty thousand men to volunteer for the Home
Army, but they still amounted to only 12 percent of the total Prussian forces.
As for the widespread German nationalism supposedly born in 1813, there is little
evidence that it spread far beyond the literati. Friedrich Wilhelm himself
acknowledged the multinational character of Prussia by issuing his March edict not
to ‘Germans’ but to Prussians, Silesians, Pomeranians and Lithuanians.”
Heinrich Heine later quipped: ‘We are told to be patriots, and we became
patriotic, because we always to what our princes tell us.’
[*The Battle of Valmy, also known as the Cannonade of Valmy, was the first
major victory by the army of France during the Revolutionary Wars that followed
the French Revolution. The battle took place on 20 September 1792 as Prussian
troops commanded by the Duke of Brunswick attempted to march on Paris. Generals
François Kellermann and Charles Dumouriez stopped the advance near the northern
village of Valmy in Champagne-Ardenne.
In this early part of the Revolutionary Wars—known as the War of the First Coalition—the new French government was in almost every way unproven, and thus the small, localized victory at Valmy became a huge psychological victory for the Revolution at large. The outcome was thoroughly unexpected by contemporary observers—a vindication for the French revolutionaries and a stunning defeat for the vaunted Prussian army. The victory emboldened the newly assembled National Convention to formally declare the end of monarchy in France and to establish the French Republic. Valmy permitted the development of the Revolution and all its resultant ripple effects, and for that it is regarded by historians as one of the most significant battles in history.]
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