Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (63 page)

Stolid, pessimistic and cautious as ever, the king was drawn to the third option. In an aide-mémoire written three days later, Frederick William set out his own views on Prussian foreign policy over the coming months. Its central theme was ‘live and let live’; Austria should be entrusted with the mediation of a general European peace. Napoleon must be obliged to come to an understanding with Tsar Alexander on the basis of mutual respect, after which he would be permitted to retire unmolested into France and to hold on to his annexed German lands on
the left bank of the Rhine. Only if he refused to be content with this arrangement would Prussia go to war, and then only at Austria’s side. The king imagined that this might occur, if at all, in April of the coming year.
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By the time Frederick William penned these lines, events were already overtaking him. On 20 December 1812, the first advance parties of Russian troops crossed the border into East Prussia. Under the terms of the alliance with France, it now fell to the Prussian General Yorck, who had managed to extricate 14,000 of his men alive from the Russian campaign, to block the further progress of the Russians and thereby cover the retreat of what remained of the Grand Army. Yorck found himself bombarded with messages from both the French and the Russian commands. Marshal Alexandre Macdonald sent orders that he clear the way for his retreat and guard the French flank against Russian attack. From the Russian commander General Diebitsch there were entreaties to abandon Macdonald and let the Russians pass unhindered. On 25 December, Yorck and Diebitsch met and it was agreed that one of the Prussians attached to the Russian headquarters should be empowered to conduct further negotiations. The man entrusted with this task was none other than the reformer, patriot and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who had left the Prussian service earlier that year.

During a difficult discussion on the evening of 29 December, Clausewitz explained to Yorck that the Russians were close by and massed in very large numbers. Any attempt to reunite with Macdonald, whose small corps had come unstuck from the Prussian contingent, would be pointless. Impressed by the cogency of Clausewitz’s arguments and the sincerity of his conviction, Yorck finally agreed: ‘Yes. You have me. Tell General Diebitsch that we shall talk early tomorrow at Poscherun Mill [near the Lithuanian town of Tauroggen, forty kilometres east of the Prussian border] and that I have now firmly decided to separate from the French and their cause.’
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The meeting was fixed for the next morning (30 December) at eight o’clock. Under the terms of the agreement drawn up there, known as the Convention of Tauroggen, Yorck undertook to
neutralize his corps for a period of two months and allow the Russians to pass unhindered into Prussian territory.

32.
Anon.,
Johann David Ludwig Count Yorck

It was a momentous decision. Yorck had no authorization whatsoever to countermand his government’s policy in this way.
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His defection was not merely disobedient; it was treasonable. This weighed very heavily with a man who was by background and nature a royalist and a conservative. Yorck attempted to justify his action in a remarkable letter he wrote to Frederick William on 3 January 1813:

Your Majesty knows me as a calm, cool-headed man who does not mix in politics. As long as everything went in the accustomed way, the loyal servant was bound to follow circumstances – that was his duty. But the circumstances have now brought about a new situation and duty likewise demands that this situation, which will never occur again, be exploited. I am speaking here the words of a loyal old servant; these words are almost universally the words of the Nation; a declaration from Your Majesty will breathe life and enthusiasm back into everything and we will fight like true old Prussians and the throne of Your Majesty will stand rock-solid and unshakeable for the future. [… ] I now anxiously await an advisement from Your Majesty as to whether I should now advance against the true enemy, or whether political conditions demand that Your Majesty condemn me. I await both outcomes in a spirit of loyal dedication and I swear to Your Majesty that I shall meet the bullets as calmly at the place of execution as on the field of battle.
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Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this letter was the fact that it made – notwithstanding the superficial rhetoric of personal loyalty – so few concessions to the monarch’s standpoint. Instead, Yorck offered Frederick William the choice of confirming his action or condemning him to death for his disobedience. Moreover, the reference to the ‘true enemy’, as opposed to the enemy projected by Berlin’s foreign policy, made it clear that Yorck had arrogated to himself one of the constitutive attributes of sovereignty, namely the right to determine who is friend and who is foe. To make matters worse, Yorck justified this act of usurpation through an implicit appeal to the ultimate authority of the hard-pressed Prussian ‘nation’.

These were surprisingly radical words from a man who had initially kept his distance from the military reformers. In 1808–9, Yorck had been a bitter opponent of armed insurrection, on the grounds that it posed too grave a threat to the political and social order. But as the pressure for action grew, he had begun to look less coldly on the populist designs of the patriots. The more he thought over the idea of a popular uprising, he told Scharnhorst in the summer of 1811, the more ‘absolutely necessary’ it seemed to be. In a memorandum submitted to the king at the end of January 1812, he set out a plan to use tightly focused insurrections in West Prussia to tie down French divisions and undercut the momentum of the main advance.
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It is hard to imagine a better illustration of the potency of the ideas that animated the reformers than this belated conversion of a hard-boiled conservative to the cause of the nation.

By the end of the first week of February 1813, the entire province of East Prussia had slipped beyond the direct control of the Berlin government. Stein, who entered the province as a functionary of the Russian administration, saw himself as empowered to exercise direct authority in the liberated areas, and he did so with his accustomed tactlessness. Various trade restrictions associated with the Napoleonic system of continental tariffs were lifted without local consultation, and the Prussian financial administration was obliged, despite bitter protests, to accept Russian paper money at a fixed rate of exchange. Flaunting his sovereign status as ‘Plenipotentiary of the Russian Emperor’, Stein even convened the East Prussian Estates in order to deliberate on arrangements for the coming war against France. ‘Intelligence, honour, love of the fatherland, and revenge,’ he told Yorck in a letter of early
February, ‘demand that we lose no time, that we call up a people’swar [… ] to break the chains of the insolent oppressor and wash away the dishonour we have suffered with the blood of his wicked bands.’
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Stein wanted Yorck to open the first meeting of the Estates with a rousing speech, but Yorck was uncomfortable with any role that would make him appear to be the agent of Russian interests. However, he did agree to attend a session if the Estates themselves formally invited him.

On 5 February, the ‘representatives of the nation’, as they were widely called at the time, congregated in the meeting hall of the House of the Provincial Estates in Königsberg. At their head sat the president, to his right seven members of the Estates Committee, flanked by the deputies of the provincial nobility, the free peasants and the cities. Almost immediately, it was agreed that a delegation should be sent to invite Yorck to present his proposals to the assembly. The deputies were surely aware of the boldness of this step: by the beginning of February it was universally known that Yorck had been dismissed from office, that his arrest had been ordered and that he was out of favour with the king. The scope of the insurrection unfolding in East Prussia now widened to the point where it encompassed the political class of the province.

Yorck appeared only briefly before the assembly, urging that a committee be formed to oversee further preparations for war and closing with a characteristically pithy declaration: ‘I hope to fight the French wherever I find them. I count on everyone’s support; if their strength outweighs ours, we will know how to die with honour.’ These words were greeted with thunderous cheers and applause, but Yorck raised his hand to silence the hall, saying: ‘There is no call for that on a battlefield!’ He then turned and left. On the same evening, a committee met in Yorck’s apartment to agree the calling up of a provincial militia (
Landwehr
) of 20,000 men with 10,000 reserves. The exemptions allowed under the old cantonal system were abolished; all adult males up to forty-five years of age, excluding only school teachers and clergymen, were declared eligible to be called up, regardless of their social status or religion – the latter stipulation implied that Jews, for the first time, would be liable for conscription. The aim was to fill the troop quotas from volunteers in the first instance and only if this proved inadequate, to proceed to conscription by ballot. The ideal of the nation at arms rising against its foe had at last been realized. In the process, the authority of the monarchical state was almost totally displaced by the Estates,
who now reactivated their traditional calling as organs of provincial governance.
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In Berlin, the government began during the January weeks to distance itself from the French alliance. On 21 January, after rumours to the effect that the French were planning to take him prisoner, Frederick William left Potsdam and transferred with Hardenberg and an entourage of some seventy persons to Breslau in Silesia, where he arrived four days later. During the first week of February, as the Estates prepared to meet in Königsberg, the king and his advisory circle remained in a state of uncertainty and indecision. To stay at the side of France seemed impossible in view of the events unfolding in the east, but the prospect of an open break with France brought the threat of total dependence upon Russia. The problem of Prussia’s exposed position between the powers of east and west had never been so dramatically expressed. The western provinces remained vulnerable to French reprisals; East and West Prussia were already under what amounted to a Russian occupation. Faced with this fundamental dilemma, the Breslau court seemed paralysed; the king, Hardenberg observed in a private note on 4 February, appeared ‘not to know what he actually wants’.
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At around the same time, however, the king began to approve decisions that pointed in the direction of a more energetic policy. Scharnhorst was recalled from his retirement, and on 8 February a general call went out for volunteers to form free corps of riflemen. On the following day, the service exemptions of the cantonal system were suspended, establishing, temporarily at least, universal male liability for military service. It was as if the government were hurrying to keep abreast of developments in its eastern provinces. But these measures did not suffice, in the short term, to arrest the collapse of public faith in the monarch and his advisers. By the middle of February, the spirit of insurrection had crossed the river Oder into the Neumark and there was talk of a revolution if the king did not immediately signal his solidarity with Russia. Even the Huguenot preacher Ancillon, one of the most cautious and ingratiating of the king’s advisers, warned him in a memorandum of 22 February that it was the ‘general will of the nation’ that the king should lead his people in a war against France. If he failed to do so, Ancillon warned, he would be swept away by events.
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Only in the last days of February did the king finally decide to throw in his lot with the Russians and break openly with Napoleon. A treaty
was signed with the Russians at Kalisch and Breslau on 27–28 February in which the Russians agreed to restore Prussia to the approximate borders of 1806. Under the terms of this treaty, Prussia would cede most of the Polish territories acquired through the second and third partitions to Russia, but retain a land corridor (in addition to West Prussia) between Silesia and East Prussia. The Russians in their turn agreed that Prussia would be compensated for these Polish concessions by the annexation of territory from the allies’ joint conquests in Germany – informal discussions pointed to Saxony, whose king was still aligned with Napoleon, as the most likely victim.

Scharnhorst was despatched to Tsar Alexander’s headquarters to begin discussions on a joint war plan. A formal announcement of the break with France followed on 17 March, and on 25 March the Russian and Prussian commands issued the joint Proclamation of Kalisch, in which the Russian tsar and the Prussian king sought to harness national enthusiasms by pledging their support for a united Germany. A committee was established under Stein’s chairmanship to recruit troops from across the German territories and to plan for the future political organization of southern and western Germany. The Prussian government now made strenuous efforts to reclaim the ground that had been lost to the forces of insurrection. On 17 March the king issued the famous address ‘To My People’, in which he justified the government’s cautious policy hitherto and called upon his people to rise up, province by province, against the French. Drafted by Theodor Gottfried Hippel, a native of Königsberg who had joined the chancellery under Hardenberg in 1811, ‘To My People’ steered a careful middle path between the insurrectionary rhetoric of the patriot radicals and the hierarchical order of traditional absolutism. Comparisons were drawn with the conservative uprisings of the Vendée (1793), Spain (1808) and the Tyrol (1808), but pointedly not with the revolutionary French
levée en masse
of 1793, and an effort was made to embed current events within a tradition of Hohenzollern dynastic leadership.
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The edict of 21 April 1813 establishing the
Landsturm
(home army) was perhaps the most radical official utterance of these weeks – it stated that home army officers were to be elected, although eligibility to ascend to officer rank was restricted to certain social and professional groups.
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