CHAPTER XXXIV
The War with Prussia[37]
The Prussian Despotism — State of Society — The Patriots — The Liberals — The Execution of Palm — The Prussian Court and the Nation — Demoralization of the Army — The Conduct of Napoleon — War Inevitable — The French Army — Napoleon's Strategic Plan — Prussian Feebleness — Napoleon's System of Travel — His Life in the Field — Another Campaign of Marching — The Affair at Schleiz — The Prussians Outflanked — French Soldiers in the Leash — The Battle of Jena — Davout and Bernadotte — The Battle of Auerstädt — Rout of the Prussian Army.
1806
Frederick William I of Prussia built up a system of admirable simplicity and economy in civil administration, which enabled him to lavish proportionately large sums on the finest army of the day. This instrument his brilliant son, Frederick the Great, used to increase the Prussian territories by an area of seventy-five thousand square miles; and when he died, having pursued his father's policy, he left his country without a debt, with a reserve of nearly forty-five million dollars in her treasury, and with a greatly increased income. His nephew and successor, Frederick William II, was also a despot, but a feeble one. Under him throve the disgraceful system of irresponsible cabinet government whereby both religious and intellectual liberty were necessarily diminished, if not destroyed. By a shameful subserviency to Austria he increased his territories, securing a small share in the disreputable partitions of Poland; but on his death in 1797 the people were sluggish, the nation was in debt, and the army was disorganized. Frederick William III was a good citizen, but a poor king. Inheriting the policy of neutrality, he had obstinately clung to it, surrounding himself with irregular privy councilors who hampered the ministers in their functions, and prevented the king from putting confidence in his legal advisers; his court was rent by factions, and but for one circumstance, shortly to be noted, would have been utterly out of touch with the nation.
In 1806, therefore, Prussia had not come under the influence of modern ideas to any appreciable degree. Serfdom of a degrading sort still existed, although not in its worst forms; the old estates of the middle ages still existed also, for the law not only upheld the division of land into noble, burgher, and peasant holdings, but even drew a corresponding distinction between various occupations, forbidding any man to pass from one class to the other, or to transfer real estate from one category to another. The towns still rested on their respective charter rights; the medieval restrictions of trade and communication were not yet entirely abolished; the common schools founded by Frederick William I were as narrow and rigid as either the craft or cathedral schools of the middle ages. Society in the smaller towns and in the country was stagnant, and the position of the individual was immobile, for he was without the spur of ambition. The land-owners were a caste which, having asserted itself as the guarantor of public order after the Thirty Years' War, and having undone the good work of the Reformation by the usurpation of feudal privilege, still held manorial courts. Though they no longer wrung their quota of the taxes from the peasants, they were haughty, exclusive, and tenacious of many petty and annoying privileges.
The one illuminated spot in this picture was small but brilliant. The young and beautiful Queen Louisa was pious, thoughtful, and high-spirited. About her was a small court party of intelligent men and women, who understood the true mission of Prussia, and were therefore eager for a declaration of war against the aggrandizing policy of Napoleon. Many of them were young and ardent, like the princes Louis and Henry; others were mature and cautious like Hardenberg and Stein, to whose efforts as alternating heads of Frederick William's cabinet Germany eventually owed her regeneration. Besides them, there were in this reform party Müller, Humboldt, Blücher, the Princess Radziwill, and others of less renown. The efforts of this little band were soon seconded by those of a somewhat larger one. The universities, having been founded in the principles of liberty, were never entirely mute. Many of the professors appreciated the backwardness of Germany, and the students formed secret associations for the destruction of local prejudice and the promotion of a large patriotism. In the greater cities, which had not entirely forgotten their former struggles with feudalism, there were also burghers in considerable number who received such doctrines kindly, and rendered invaluable service in keeping the embers of liberty from extinction.
Among the indifferent millions there was also a remnant who, having been at first enthusiastic for the liberalizing side of the French Revolution, were now opposed to its conquering and domineering tendency as represented by the Empire, and looked for the realization of their ideals in the regeneration of their own country. Early in 1806 their leading men began to be heard: Schleiermacher among the clergy; Fichte, the sometime admirer of the revolutionary movement, among the philosophers; E. M. Arndt among the men of letters. By the middle of 1806 the new doctrines had mildly permeated the whole nation. The few earnest spirits who still believed in the cosmopolitan equality of all men as the goal of humanity, who longed for Augustine's city of God on earth, without the rivalry of nations and the tumults of exaggerated patriotism, were soon reduced to silence. If Napoleon were, as thousands believed, the appointed agent for this end, they might still hope, but they could no longer speak.
The faith of these idealists must have been rudely shaken by various pieces of news received during the summer. In the very midst of the seething agitation, Murat, the Grand Duke Joachim I of Berg, dashing and irresponsible, spoke of a kingdom soon to be his, possibly meaning the Hanseatic cities; or perhaps he looked for Sweden, whose royal house, one of the most despotic in Europe, was so hated by Napoleon that it was merely a question of time when it would cease to reign. This feeling had recently been intensified by a fatuous attempt to besiege Hameln and drive the French from Hanover, made in the previous November by the Duke of Södermanland, then regent for Gustavus Adolphus IV, but afterward King Charles XIII. The noisy Augereau, too, had exasperated the people of Ansbach, where he was in command, by drinking toasts in public to the success of the French in their coming war with Prussia. These and a thousand other minor irritations combined with the occupation of Wesel to raise the tide of popular feeling still higher. The Emperor of the French was dismayed, but he could think of no other remedy than severity. Accordingly, Berthier was instructed to proceed against the authors and publishers of "political libels" by martial law, on the plea that a commander must care for his army, and that those who stir up the people against it are worthy of death. This might be well enough in war, but it was an absurd and wicked pretext not only in a time of peace, but during an illegal occupation. A certain Ansbacher, Yelin, had but lately written a plain, truth-telling pamphlet entitled, "Germany in her Deepest Humiliation," and it was circulated, though not exactly published, by Palm, a bookseller of Nuremberg. The author was unknown to the French authorities, but Palm was arrested, hastily court-martialed, and shot. He met death with the fortitude of a martyr, conscious that his blood was the seed of patriots. The news of this murder traveled like wildfire; excitement and indignation reached their highest pitch, and the uprising against Napoleon became national in the widest sense. It was long before the officials of Prussia realized the vital importance of the popular feeling thus aroused.
For some weeks after ratifying the treaty which Napoleon substituted for that of Schönbrunn the Berlin cabinet simply fretted in impotence. The young officers of the war party were sharpening their swords on the steps of the French embassy and demanding the disgrace of Haugwitz; there was even insubordination, and the King, with tears streaming from his eyes, threatened to abdicate. His cup of bitterness was more than full. When the Confederation of the Rhine was formed, he besought the Czar to guarantee the integrity of Turkey, hoping that this apple of discord between Russia and France being removed, Prussia would be secure. But Alexander, trusting to gain French neutrality and carry out his schemes of Oriental aggrandizement by slight concessions in the Oubril negotiations as to Naples, Sardinia, and Hanover, refused, vaguely promising to do all in his power to protect the integrity of Prussia, provided Prussia would not attack Russia should he go to war with France about Turkey. The privy councilors of Frederick William, blind to the national feeling which would gladly support a war against Napoleon's tyranny, proposed thereupon to form what French diplomacy skilfully suggested, a League of the North. The King and his advisers at first thought such a federation would be an offset to the menace of their dangerous neighbor on the West. Although kept in ignorance of the Russian and English negotiations at Paris, they heard in August that Hanover had been offered to Great Britain, and felt that the French occupation of southern Germany was intolerable. Accordingly the King opened negotiations with Napoleon for the formation of a North German Confederation to include Saxony, the two Mecklenburgs, Oldenburg, Hesse-Cassel, the Hanseatic towns, and a number of minor principalities. The Emperor could not well give a categorical refusal, and consented on condition that Prussia should disarm. In this interval Alexander contemptuously rejected the extraordinary conditions granted by Oubril in a paper which not only abandoned the Naples Bourbons, the house of Savoy, and the Hanoverian question, but also guaranteed the integrity of the Ottoman Empire! This attitude of the Czar made the disarmament of Prussia essential to Napoleon's supremacy in Germany, the more so because, by the demise of the German-Roman Empire, Russia had lost her right of intervention in Germany, and would probably seek a new pretext to recover it.