1812. Adam Zamoyski
so, he wrote to the Emperor on 3 August 1807 entreating him to accept Prussia as an ally of France, addressing him as ‘the greatest man of our century’. Napoleon ignored the request. The reason he did not wish to encumber himself with such an ally was that he intended to despoil the country. In the treaty he had foisted on Prussia, he had undertaken to evacuate his troops, but only after all the indemnities agreed upon had been paid. But the level of the indemnities was never agreed, and while vast amounts of money did pour out of the Prussian treasury into French coffers, some 150,000 French troops continued to live off the land, happily helping themselves to everything they required. French military authorities virtually supervised the administration, while the economy plummeted. The Prussian army had been reduced to 42,000 men, with the result that hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers and even officers wandered the land begging for their subsistence.3
Napoleon did consider abolishing Prussia altogether. The kingdom had only emerged as a major power sixty years before (as a result of a French defeat), but it was efficient and expansive, and might one day rally the rest of Germany, which was something he wanted to avoid at all costs. But while he continued to exploit and humiliate it in every way, he did not get around to dismantling it. In effect, Napoleon’s treatment of Prussia is paradigmatic of his whole mishandling of the German issue, for which his successors were still paying in 1940.
If Frederick William had every reason to feel aggrieved, most of the other rulers in Germany, grouped in the Confederation of the Rhine, had much to thank Napoleon for. For one thing, they were relieved to be rid of the heavy-handed Habsburg overlordship. Although they were now subjected to Napoleon through a series of alliances, they had grown in power within their own realms. Several had even been promoted, and most had gained in territory, becoming proper sovereigns with their own armies.
Landgrave Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstädt had seen the size of his fief swell, and became a grand duke; the tiny Landgravate of Baden had also become a grand duchy, and its ruler Frederick Charles willingly married his grandson to Napoleon’s stepdaughter Stephanie de Beauharnais. The Elector of Saxony had seen his realm expand and turn into a kingdom. Bavaria too was enlarged and turned into a kingdom, and in 1809 King Maximillian I acquired more territory, making his realm larger than Prussia. Württemberg, which had been a mere duchy, was extended with every Napoleonic victory and its elector Frederick was promoted to the rank of king in 1806. He was only too happy to see his daughter marry Napoleon’s brother Jérôme.
Jérôme himself ruled over the Kingdom of Westphalia, created by Napoleon at the heart of Charlemagne’s Germany with its capital at Cassel, extended again in 1810 to include Hanover, Bremen and part of the North Sea coast. ‘What the people of Germany desire impatiently is that individuals who are not noble but have talents should have an equal right to your consideration and to employment, that all kinds of servitude and all intermediary links between the sovereign and the lowest class of the people should be entirely abolished,’ Napoleon wrote to Jérôme as he took up the throne of Westphalia. ‘The benefits of the Code Napoléon, transparency of procedures and the jury system will be the distinguishing characteristics of your monarchy. And if I have to be quite open with you, I count more on their effect for the extension and consolidation of your monarchy than on the greatest victories. Your people must enjoy a liberty and equality and a well-being unknown to the other peoples of Germany,’ he continued, making it clear that the security of his throne and that of France were better served by this great benefit she was able to bestow than by any number of armies or fortresses.4
Some of the other rulers did follow the French example and adopted the Code Napoléon. King Maximillian of Bavaria even brought in a constitution. Most of them, however, only introduced those French laws which gave them greater power over their subjects, sweeping away in the process venerable institutions and hard-won privileges. But whether they were enlightened liberals or authoritarian despots like the King of Württemberg, their subjects were immeasurably better off in every way than they had been before they had heard of Bonaparte.
Causes for discontent nevertheless began to pile up. The most vociferous opponents of the new arrangements were, unsurprisingly, the horde of imperial counts and knights who had lost their estates and privileges. More liberal elements were disappointed that the changes wrought by Napoleon had not gone far enough. The old free cities and some of the bishoprics, which had been havens of German patriotism, had been awarded to one or other of the rulers Napoleon had favoured. Along with their independence they lost some of their freedoms. Many were disappointed that the old aristocratic oligarchy had not been replaced by republics, and some would have liked to see the creation of one great German state.
The high-handedness of the arrangements, with Napoleon callously shunting provinces from one state to another, could not fail to offend Germans at every level. French became the official language in some areas. French officials were placed in key posts, and the higher ranks in the armies of the various sovereigns were reserved for Frenchmen. The large-scale official looting was also highly offensive. French military impositions and the Continental System, which actually had the effect of stimulating the coalmining and steel industries in Germany, became a cause for everyday grumbling by the very classes that naturally supported the changes brought in by Napoleon.
Cultural factors also played a part. Cosmopolitan and outward-looking as the Germans were, they were generally, whether they were Catholics or Protestants, very pious, and they found the godlessness of revolutionary and Napoleonic France shocking. In Lutheran circles, the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur was even referred to as ‘the sign of the Beast’. Napoleon was more popular amongst Catholic Germans, until June 1809, when he dispossessed the Pope and imprisoned him in Savona, drawing upon his head the Pontiff’s excommunication. The Germans also nurtured an age-old sense of their ‘otherness’, a vision of themselves as ‘true’ and ‘pure’ in contrast to the French, whom they viewed as essentially flighty and artificial, if not actually false and corrupt.5
It was not long before these feelings began to have practical consequences. Her catastrophic defeat in 1806 had prompted Prussia to embark on a far-ranging programme of reform and modernisation. Those in charge of carrying it out realised that a real revolution was required, both in the army, where the soldier was transformed from a conscript motivated entirely by ferocious eighteenth-century discipline into a professional inspired by love of his country, and in society as a whole, where an edict passed in 1807 swept away the remnants of feudalism and emancipated the peasantry.
This was to be a revolution from above, carried out, in the words of Frederick William’s Minister Count Karl August von Hardenberg, ‘through the wisdom of those in authority’ rather than by popular impulse. It was also to be a spiritual revolution. One of its chief architects, Baron vom Stein, a mediatised knight, wanted ‘to reawaken collective spirit, civic sense, devotion to the country, the feeling of national honour and independence, so that a vivifying and creative spirit would replace the petty formalism of a mechanical apparatus’.6
The process was largely carried out by German nationalists from other parts of the country. Baron vom Stein was from Nassau, Count Hardenberg was from Hanover, as was General Gerhard Johann Scharnhorst; Gebhart Blücher was from Mecklemburg, August Gneisenau was a Saxon. They were inspired by the example of revolutionary France in their determination to infuse a national spirit into every part of the army and administration. But their reforms aimed not so much at emancipating people as at turning them into efficient and enthusiastic servants of the state. Many of them believed that only a strong Prussia would be able to liberate and unite the German lands, and then go on to challenge French cultural and political primacy. A powerful tool in this was to be education, and Wilhelm von Humboldt was put in charge of a programme of reform of the system that culminated in the opening of a university in Berlin in 1810.
At a popular level, the urge to seek regeneration through purification manifested itself through the formation of the Tugendbund, or League of Virtue, by a group of young officers in Berlin. Its aims were non-political in principle, consisting of self-perfection through education and moral elevation, but since this included the fostering of national consciousness and the encouragement of love of the fatherland, they were deeply so in practice. The membership never exceeded a few hundred, and all they did was sit around talking of insurrection, guerrilla