Citizen Emperor (49 page)

A more serious violation of Prussian neutrality occurred in October 1805, when Napoleon ordered Marshal Bernadotte and his troops to march through the Prussian territory of Ansbach and Bayreuth on their way south to join up with forces in Bavaria.
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Just what he was thinking by ordering French troops through Prussian territory at a time when he had a special envoy in Berlin trying to coax their king into an alliance with France is difficult to say. The official explanation offered to Frederick William – that France had crossed Prussian territory before, during the revolutionary wars, and believed it could do so again – may be as straightforward an explanation for Napoleon’s arrogant behaviour as one can find.
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As a result of the violation, public sentiment against France reached new heights. One young French officer sent to Berlin with dispatches noted how people he once knew no longer spoke to him, and how officers of the Prussian Noble Guard, in a public display of warlike contempt, whetted their swords on the steps of the French embassy.
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It was a wonderfully melodramatic gesture, born of a conceit that could no longer be justified. Prussia had soundly defeated France during the Seven Years’ War, had occupied Holland in the space of a few weeks in 1787, and during the War of the First Coalition had held its own against the French. But the gesture belies the divisions that existed within the army about the advisability of going to war. The Prussian army was about to discover that it was no longer a match for Napoleon.

Frederick William, normally reserved and even timid, was furious when news of the violation reached Berlin. He signed a secret alliance with Russia (the Treaty of Potsdam), and sent his foreign minister, Count Christian von Haugwitz, to deliver an ultimatum to Napoleon. However, by the time Haugwitz caught up with Napoleon at Schönbrunn outside Vienna, the situation had radically changed: Napoleon had defeated the allies at Austerlitz.
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Faced with an irate Napoleon, and knowing that Austria was negotiating a separate peace, the Prussian envoy signed a treaty of alliance with France on 15 December 1805 that obliged his country to occupy the Electorate of Hanover – the possession of the King of England – and to close the North Sea ports to British goods. Prussia thus went from being a member of the coalition and an enemy of France to becoming an ally of Napoleon nominally at war with Britain.
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The volte-face was not without controversy in high political circles in Berlin, but as one prominent Prussian personality put it, ‘France is all-powerful and Napoleon is the man of the century; what have we to fear if united with him?’
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A lot, as it turned out. The strange series of events was no doubt one of the reasons why Frederick William overreacted when rumours of Napoleon handing back Hanover to Britain reached Berlin; they pushed the Prussian elite over the edge. The real issue was Napoleon’s continued interference in northern Germany. For Berlin, this was intolerable; it represented a mortal threat to the very existence of Prussia as a great power. Napoleon therefore had to be resisted at all costs. In the months of June and July 1806 Frederick William and his cabinet decided on war with France.
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It was a bold if not foolhardy move considering that Prussia was almost alone. Almost, but not quite. Feelers had been put out to Russia to join Prussia in the coming struggle. Alexander, who had all this time been negotiating with France, went to Berlin in November 1805, and was received with more than usual pomp by a Frederick William desperate to impress.
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He went so far as to rebaptize St George Square, east of the city, Alexanderplatz. A treaty was signed between Russia and Prussia that committed Russian troops to a new, fourth coalition against France. The problem was timing. Prussia was keen to launch an offensive against France as soon as possible and did not wait for Russian troops to arrive. The Prussians did so in part because they no more trusted their Russian allies than they did their French foe, and in part because they needed to show their allies they were determined.
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In September 1806, when Napoleon heard that Prussia was mobilizing against him, he could hardly believe it. By then, Prussia was the only Eastern great power against which he had not tested his mettle. It was also one he mistrusted: he had not forgotten its rapprochement with the allies in the spring of 1805. ‘The memory of the harm the Prussian armies . . . could have done . . . is still alive, festering, breathing a desire for revenge.’
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It is perhaps why, consciously or otherwise, he set about provoking Prussia into a showdown.

Napoleon in all of this, as was his wont, saw himself not as aggressor but as victim. While he had done just about everything in his power to antagonize both Russia and Britain, and had precipitated a conflict with Prussia, he was still able to write to Talleyrand to say, ‘I have no interest in disturbing the peace on the Continent.’
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He had the impression that he was alone, and that there was no possibility of an ‘alliance with any great European power’. What he referred to as his ‘system of peace’ was in effect a system of conquest and occupation.
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True, there was little or no chance of coming to any agreement with Prussia. His attitude towards Berlin was dictated by what he considered to be its despicable behaviour on the international scene, behaviour that was not worthy of the country of Frederick the Great.
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Avenging Rossbach

Countries sometimes go to war expecting to lose, and do so because fighting and losing is better than not fighting at all.
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Frederick William’s decision to go to war could not have come at a worse time. Austria was still reeling from its defeat the previous year and it was probably not averse to seeing Prussia take a hiding from Napoleon; Pitt had died and the new government in London had entered into tentative negotiations with France; Britain and Sweden had declared war against Prussia, and Britain was not in any case prepared to consider Prussia’s demands for money until it had withdrawn from Hanover, something that would have placed Prussia in a strategically weakened position; while the Confederation of the Rhine enabled Napoleon to dispose of even more troops.
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On top of all that there was the strategic blunder represented by the Prussian ultimatum at this particular point in time. It was bad enough that the Russians were still far away and would take months to march enough troops into the field of operations, but Prussia had acted too soon. French troops were still stationed in the south of Germany from the campaign the previous year. Declaring war while the French were still in Germany enabled Napoleon quickly to launch an offensive, to march directly north, to pass the Prussian army and then to turn west against it, pushing it ever further away from Berlin and potential Russian reinforcements.
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Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, against his own better judgement, reluctantly took on the role of Prussia’s commander-in-chief, and yet his own state remained neutral. This was the man who had lost the battle of Valmy in 1792, a defeat admittedly inflicted by a larger French army, but his reputation, despite his advanced age – he was seventy-one – remained intact. Brunswick was typical of the Prussian officer corps; of its 142 generals, half were over sixty, thirteen over seventy, and another four over eighty.
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In this particular instance, as we shall see, youth and energy were going to run rings around old age and experience. According to one Prussian officer, Friedrich von Müffling, Brunswick took over in order to avoid war.
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Apart from Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, none of the Prussian generals, who correctly assessed the comparative strengths of the Prussian and French armies, were terribly confident of victory.
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The king was so pessimistic that he predicted a catastrophe that would make people forget Austerlitz.
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Despite this, the political elite in Berlin made the decision to go to war, or rather, once the decision had been made it was difficult to back down.

If the Prussian high command was racked with self-doubt, the troops were confident of success. They should not have been. They had not fought a war in over ten years. Moreover, there were two very different conceptions about how to wage war. Napoleon set out to achieve a decisive blow, concentrating all his troops in the process; the Prussians on the other hand prepared for a war of ‘moderate intensity’ and did not therefore see the necessity of concentrating forces quickly or in one place.
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In a mirror image of Valmy at the beginning of the revolutionary wars, the French army was going to interpose itself between the Prussian army and Berlin so that their fronts were reversed.

Napoleon left Saint-Cloud on 25 September 1806 and reached Bamberg on 6 October, Kronach on the 8th. He often travelled at night in order to avoid the congestion on the roads, caused by his own troops. He rode into Jena on the afternoon of 13 October, past French units that were already looting the town.
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There was little he could do. The German philosopher Georg Hegel was living in Jena at the time, putting the finishing touches to his
Phenomenology of Spirit
. He saw Napoleon ride out of town later in the afternoon to inspect the French positions, and described him as the ‘soul of the world’ (
Weltseele
). ‘It is truly a remarkable sensation to see such an individual on horseback, raising his arm over the world and ruling it . . . It is only from heaven, that is, from the will of the French Emperor, that matters can be set in motion.’
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This was Napoleon as autonomous force, as world force, as wave of destiny that swept all before him, supremely confident on the eve of battle. He sent off a letter to Talleyrand asserting that everything, everything had gone according to plan, and that ‘interesting things’ would happen in two or three days.
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He was convinced the Prussians did not stand a chance and that their generals were imbeciles. In fact, he was mistaken in one respect; he did not find himself confronting the main Prussian army, but rather a secondary army under Prince Hohenlohe.

When Napoleon gave the order to attack at about five o’clock on the morning of 14 October, a thick layer of fog masked the landscape so that visibility, at least for a few hours, was limited to about ten paces.
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As the sun rose, however, it turned into a clear, beautiful autumn day. The Comte de Chamans was woken from a bad sleep by the sound of cannon; he and his corps marched through a forest that had hidden them the previous day and soon engaged with the Prussians on the left flank.
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Despite his belief that he was engaging the main Prussian army, Napoleon was facing Hohenlohe’s corps of about 40,000 against whom he could bring 55,600 men, with another 40,000 troops expected during the course of the day. Hohenlohe should have fought a rearguard action, trying to join up with the bulk of the Prussian forces further north. Instead, he counter-attacked, taking the village of Jena, and then just stood there in open formation as the French skirmishers and artillery weighed into his hapless troops. Hohenlohe was expecting reinforcements from General Rüchel, about ten kilometres away. Rüchel was of the old school; it took him five hours to get his men to travel that distance, marching them in step and in line as though they were on a parade ground instead of hurrying to the scene of the battle. By the time he got there, it was too late.

It was Davout who ran into the bulk of the Prussian forces east of the town of Auerstädt in what has been described as one of the most extraordinary feats of the Napoleonic wars.
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Approximately 27,000 French troops and 44 cannon faced 63,000 Prussians supported by 230 guns.
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Things went very badly very quickly for the Prussians. Their commander, the Duke of Brunswick, was shot in the eye early in the battle and later died, Marshal von Möllendorf, a senior military adviser, was captured, Prince Henry mortally wounded, and Prince William seriously wounded. When informed that Brunswick had been wounded, Frederick William took over as commander, but he was soon out of his depth. By noon, his troops were caught in a murderous crossfire from the French who occupied high ground on both flanks. Later than afternoon, the king broke off the battle – even before news had come in of what was taking place to the south, at Jena – though he still possessed strong reserves. The retreat towards Weimar that evening took place in good order until they came across the fleeing army of Hohenlohe. Only then did chaos take over the main army, made worse by the large number of camp followers who blocked the roads and inhibited an orderly retreat.
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A better-integrated, better-led French army defeated a poorly integrated, poorly led Prussian army. It would be years before the Prussians fully learnt the lessons of defeat.