Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

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of pure display. After bringing about an English intervention it produced the

same result in Austria and led to the rupture of the Franco-Russian alliance.

From now onwards, Napoleon needed two armies. The proportion of

recruits rose, and spoiled the army’s cohesion. Not daring to ask France for

an adequate number of conscripts, he fell back upon an increasing propor-

tion of foreigners, and the quality of both armies began to suffer.

THE WAR OF 1809

The war of 1809 was the natural result of the rising in Spain. The departure

of the Grande Armée awakened new hopes in Austria, and spurred her on to

new adventures. The example of Spain roused the Germans to a state of

romantic excitement which hastened the crisis. Napoleon was taken by

surprise and was compelled to raise a new army that won its victories with

difﬁ culty. The victory of Wagram seemed for the moment to restore the

Continental System; but the Franco-Russian alliance, proving unequal to

this new attack on the Empire, stood inexorably condemned.

THE AWAKENING OF GERMANY

Since the early years of the century, German thought had been more and

more given over to a Romantic mysticism. Goethe, serene and impassive as

ever, remained true to himself, although Schiller’s death in 1805 had left

him cruelly isolated. With the Jena and Berlin friends scattered, and Novalis

dead, Heidelberg now became the centre where Grenzer, the expounder of

mythologies, gathered round him the chief leaders of the second generation

in the Romantic movement – men like Clemens Brentano, the son of a

Rhineland merchant of Italian origin, Achim von Arnim, a Prussian Junker,

and Bettina, sister of the former and wife of the latter, together with La

Motte-Fouqué, who was descended from French refugees. After teaching at

Coblenz, Görres ﬁ nally joined them, and they were in touch with Tieck,

with the brothers Boisserée, who were trying to revive the study of medieval

art in Cologne, and with Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, librarians at Cassel. The

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vogue of this school was of advantage to Schelling, who was increasingly

absorbed in a mystical symbolism against which Fichte was having some

difﬁ culty in defending his reputation. Not till 1806 did Hegel approach the

completion of his Phenomenology of Mind .

The Romantics were rapidly being impelled by a return to the past – and

sometimes by their own interests – towards the traditional religions and the

counter-revolution. Schleiermacher had taken up his duties as a pastor once

again; Adam Müller and Friedrich Schlegel became Catholics, in 1805 and

1808 respectively. There was general praise of the good old days – which

they painted in quite imaginary colours – when the people lived happy lives

under the fatherly authority of the aristocracy. Even Fichte, whom they

despised for his intellectualism, and who had broken off relations with

them, did not escape their inﬂ uence. As early as 1804, in the third edition

of the Science of Knowing , he brought back, above the level of the ego , an abso-

lute which demanded effort, thus withdrawing the unconditional autonomy

of the self. In his Characteristics of the Present Age , he distinguished certain periods

in human history which he called, in sermon-like fashion, the ‘age of inno-

cence’, ‘the beginning of sin’ and ‘the age of total sinfulness’ – this last

characterising man’s present condition, given over to an unrestrained indi-

vidualism from which it was necessary to rescue him in order to secure his

‘salvation’. True, he was still a democrat and a republican; but having studied

Machiavelli, he was temperamentally inclined to admire the heroic and

conquering state and turn away in distaste from the merely utilitarian ideals

of the Enlightenment. With an increasingly pessimistic and authoritarian

outlook, he was more and more looking to the state to compel men – who

were decidedly evil by nature – to conform to reason and to the Science of

Knowing .

In itself, German Romanticism as deﬁ ned by August Schlegel in his Berlin

lectures from 1801 to 1804, gave a powerful stimulus to a cultural patri-

otism. He denounced classical art as the apotheosis of the artiﬁ cial, while

Romanticism, the natural expression of the Germanic genius, was entirely

spontaneous; from which he drew the conclusion that German civilisation

led the world. But the Heidelberg Romantics, making a concrete study of

their country’s past literary history, exercised a far more rapid inﬂ uence.

Poets as they were, they cared little for strict method, but applied themselves

to an enthusiastic and inquisitive examination of legends and popular tales

which they translated and adapted. Tieck had led the way in 1803; and in

1805 and 1808, Brentano and Arnim published their famous collection, Des

Knaben Wunderhorn . Görres followed in their footsteps, and in 1807 collected a

certain number of tales taken from the Teutschen Volksbücher . The Minnesinger was

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rescued from oblivion, the Nibelungenlied was translated, and Sigard was discov-

ered by La Motte-Fouqué. It was in this sense that Stein could write: ‘It was

Heidelberg that chieﬂ y kindled the German ﬂ ame which later swept the

French out of our country.’

At this deeper level, national feeling thus remained cultural rather than

political; but there was more than one latent sign of a hidden development

at work. The re-establishment of despotism in France ﬁ lled the liberals with

irritation and despair. Posselt committed suicide not long after Moreau’s

condemnation; Schlabrendorf and Reichardt began to write against

Napoleon, and Beethoven removed the name of Bonaparte from the score

of the Eroica Symphony. All these men had a grudge against France for

having, as they thought, disavowed the principles of 1789, and they declared

the French nation to be vicious and frivolous. In 1804 Herder’s cosmopol-

itan outlook was for the moment obscured by a ﬁ t of nationalism, causing

him to dedicate an ode to ‘Germania’. Nor were the Prussians alone in

being stirred by the Austrian defeats and the disappearance of the Holy

Roman Empire. In 1805 Arndt, in the ﬁ rst part of his Geist der Zeit , adopted

a tone of undisguised hostility to France. The state, which had so far

been distasteful to German thinkers as an organ of restraint, now began

to take on a certain value in their eyes as a protector of the community and

an educator of the individual. In 1802, in another of his books – Germanien

und Europa – Arndt had declared that natural frontiers and access to the sea

were necessary for the free development of a people; and as early as 1800

Fichte, describing a socialist society which would assure freedom and

equality to all, thought this would only be possible in ‘a closed state’ that

was self-supporting – a state to which he consequently gave the right to a

sufﬁ ciently large and varied extent of territory to provide for all its needs.

In 1805 he was also inclined to look to the state to rescue man from a

condition of sin.

Nevertheless it needed the catastrophe of 1806 and the French occupa-

tion to precipitate and generalise this development. Not that this was any

sudden or universal movement: after Jena, as well as before it, there were

still admirers of Napoleon, like Buchholtz in Berlin. Johannes von Müller

became Jérôme’s minister; the University of Leipzig named a constellation

after the victor; Goethe had an interview with him at the same time as the

Erfurt conversations; Hegel, who had caught a glimpse of him at Jena, called

him ‘the soul of the world’, and even in 1809, when he was professor at

Nuremberg, he advised the Bavarians to adopt the Civil Code. Nonetheless,

it is clear that certain of the intellectual leaders in the German nation

began to change their tone as from 1807, either in aggressive praise of the

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superiority of German culture, or in proclaiming their loyalty to local rulers;

and there were certain symptoms to show that among the mass of the

people, particularly in Prussia, apathy was being succeeded by irritation

and hostility. Some of these manifestations are well known, such as

Schleiermacher’s sermons at Halle and Berlin, which ended by rousing

distrust of the French authorities, or the publication by Arnim of the Zeitung

für Einsiedler in 1808; and, above all, the Addresses to the German Nation given by

Fichte in Berlin in the year 1807. It was natural enough for Prussia’s misfor-

tunes to ﬁ nd a special echo in the outlook of men who were specially linked

to it by birth or career. Simultaneously, however, Germans in the north, in

Dresden and in Vienna, began implanting a Romanticism and a national

pride that were fast becoming inseparable. In the spring of 1806 Adam

Müller, who was Prussian in origin, a convert to Catholicism and a friend of

Gentz, who had successfully managed to ﬁ nd him a place in the Austrian

administration, began a series of lectures on the principles that ensure the

life and the continuity of states. Together with Kleist, he published in 1807

a review entitled Phoebus , intended to ‘foster German art and science’; and in

Vienna, August Schlegel, after a long spell at Coppet as the tutor of Madame

de Staël’s son, followed her in her wanderings through Germany, and was

authorised to begin a course in literature in which he took an even more

incisive line than in Berlin. Soon Romanticism found a home in Caroline

Pichler’s salon, and a centre from which it could spread.

Everywhere these literary ﬁ gures now began to enter into close relations

with the champions of warlike action. Obliged as they were to tread deli-

cately where foreigners were concerned and beware of governmental suspi-

cions, they could not exactly summon their audience to take up arms, but

had to go on stressing more particularly the original characteristics and the

superiority of Germanic culture. Fichte more especially took up and devel-

oped Schlegel’s theme – that each people shows its inner soul through an art

that is its own particular and speciﬁ c expression; but that of all nations, the

Germans were privileged to possess a language which had developed by a

continuous progress from its earliest beginnings, an Ursprache , which had

never undergone any serious contamination. Thus its essential character and

the forms expressing it constituted a harmonious whole. The Romance

languages, on the other hand, were the mere debris of a dead language, and

English nothing but a hybrid dialect, while the genres and the rules of clas-

sical French literature had been borrowed from antiquity. The Latin and

Anglo-Saxon peoples, Fichte maintained, not having created their means of

expression, therefore had to translate their thought by artiﬁ cial methods

which stiﬂ ed its life and spontaneity; whereas German literature, being the

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only truly original one, was supreme in the spiritual realm, and its culture

was a message from God to the human race. The pretensions of the Holy

Roman Empire to universal dominion and more especially the oppression

suffered by millions among the Baltic and Slavonic peoples were already

making Germans look upon themselves as a master race; and Fichte’s

Addresses , with the mystical justiﬁ cation of national pride which had

intoxicated their spirits since the time of Luther, were to become part of the

gospel of pan-Germanism. As far as the conception of the state was

concerned, Adam Müller, though less emotional, was perhaps more novel in

outlook. For Fichte still considered the state as a ﬁ tting instrument for

ensuring individual progress. Once the French were expelled, his nation

would have the same right to bring about a democratic and republican revo-

lution. Müller, on the other hand, as a true Romantic, regarded the state as

a being in its own right, pursuing speciﬁ c ends to which the individual

destiny must be subordinated. Speaking to an aristocratic audience, he

would defend both the independence of Germany and feudal society against

any newfangled ideas.

Expressed by word of mouth these doctrines must, to start with, have

exercised a fairly limited inﬂ uence; and even in print, their spread can only

have been gradual. Yet it is possible that they proved a stimulus to masonic

lodges and secret societies, and so spread more rapidly than might have

been expected at ﬁ rst sight. In any case their immediate importance has

been exaggerated through a failure to take sufﬁ cient account of the economic

and social consequences of the French conquest which imbued all classes

with a direct hatred of the foreigner, without there being necessarily any

assistance of an ideological kind. Among writers themselves, there was still

the steady fear of seeing French supplant German once again as the language

of literature and so reducing the ﬁ eld of professional activity. ‘Who knows’,

wrote Kleist, ‘whether in a hundred years’ time there will still be anyone in

the country who speaks German?’

Except in East Prussia, the war damage had not been very great; but the

contributions and requisitionings seemed a crushing load, and military

occupation, with all its excesses, abuses and manifold burdens – such as

billeting, transport and work on fortiﬁ cations – was an even greater source

of annoyance. In this respect, Napoleon’s methods of warfare had unex-

pected repercussions from the moment when hostilities seemed in danger

of lasting for ever, as in 1807. All the same, his ﬁ nancial policy and the

political upheavals were probably even more important in their conse-

quences. In the countries under his authority he levied war contributions

just as he did in enemy countries, and neither Jérôme nor Murat was spared.

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In order to put them in a position to provide troops he restored their

ﬁ nances by cutting down debt, suspending the payment of dividends and

pensions, and dismissing a number of ofﬁ cials and ofﬁ cers without any

compensation. Prussia, face to face with bankruptcy, had to do likewise, and

at any rate in her case, with the army being reduced and so many provinces

taken away from her, there seemed to be little prospect for the future. The

wretched state of the people was partly the reason for the rising in Hesse in

December 1806 and for the sporadic attacks on French troops in Pomerania

and Prussia. But more widespread causes were to be found in the impover-

ishment of the nobles and the middle classes, the exasperation felt by ofﬁ cers

and ofﬁ cials who had lost their posts and the unrest among the youth of the

universities who were seeking employment. All these sufferings and

passionate feelings became focused in a national sentiment that seemed

both to justify and to ennoble them. These then were the social elements

most likely to provide leaders for resistance, and it was among them that the

Tugendbund, for instance, came into being. Founded at Königsberg in April

1808, it had twenty-ﬁ ve lodges by 1809 and more than seven hundred

members. Its authority was not conﬁ ned to Prussia, for we know that Karl

Müller made contact with the patriots in Leipzig. It was in fact a ‘society for

the promotion of civic virtues’, and aimed at keeping a watch upon the

agents of the state and its citizens, and at punishing any who should

co-operate with the enemy. Despite the approval given to it by the king,

his ministers looked upon it as a rival authority, and Stein deplored the

reappearance of a Holy Vehme.

There is every reason to believe that this society was eventually destined

to become the nucleus of a popular uprising against Napoleon. The idea of

a mass insurrection had its roots in the ferment of Romanticism; in the

literary idealisation of the primitive German warrior under the command

of Hermann in the middle of primeval forests, defying the Roman legions

who were the instruments of despotism; and in the revolt of William Tell

and the German Swiss, which Schiller’s masterpiece had added to the

national heritage in 1805. It drew sustenance too from the recent history of

France, recalling on the one hand the example of the Vendée, and on the

other the volunteers of the Committee of Public Safety. But it was the revolt

in Spain that was principally responsible for raising excitement to fever

pitch. From July 1808 onwards newspapers, pamphlets and speeches vied

with one another in its praise, with the tacit approval of the various govern-

* [Medieval secret society which administered summary justice, including torture and

execution, for heresy, crime and immorality.]

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ments. Its complex origins enabled it to win the approval of all parties: the

aristocrats saw the Spaniards as faithful subjects, the democrats as free men

rising up against their oppressors, and the statesmen as good citizens who

had hastened to the assistance of the regular army.

Nevertheless, a mass uprising was inevitably associated with the ideas

spread by the Revolution. In appealing to the people to take part in public

life, it was also an inducement to claim in return for their military services

to their country the civil and political rights that properly belonged to them.

It seemed to be the symbol of the new power that would be acquired by the

state if it abolished privilege and set free the energies of the individual man.

It borrowed from Napoleon, the revolutionary leader, some of his own

weapons and used them back against him. This was why in the end the aris-

tocracy and the governments of the ancien régime refused to make an open

appeal to the masses. And so in the history of the German national move-

ment, Austria and Prussia would once again be found in opposing camps.

From the very beginning, patriots turned to one or to the other, according

to their origin, their career and their religion, but also according to their

political leanings. Austria, with its Catholic tradition, stiﬂ ed all intellectual

life, and obscurantism stood in the way of any hopes of reform or popular

movement. Prussia, on the other hand, had always prided herself on allowing

a certain freedom of thought and had recently raised to power a certain

number of men drawn from all parts of Germany who were open to Western

inﬂ uences and determined to modernise both government and society. Yet it

was Austria that provided the Romantic ferment with its man of action in

the person of Stadion, while in Prussia the leaders of the patriotic party were

in the end disowned by the king. The eminently dramatic crisis of 1809 is

thus a proof of the demoralising effect of this dual and contradictory strain

in the German outlook.

PRUSSIA

The old Prussia was led by a bureaucracy, and its army by the nobility. In any

other country, the catastrophe of 1806, which was thought to be impossible

in Prussia, might have produced a revolution. True, Napoleon would not

have permitted it, for he knew the simplest way to exploit a conquered

country was to preserve its traditional framework. Because they lacked a

powerful middle class, the Prussians were unable to rebel. The reforming

party was recruited from the higher bureaucracy itself, and had the assist-

ance of a small number of nobles and cultivated bourgeois. But the unique

feature was that these aristocrats, who were both conservative and liberal in

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outlook, were intelligent enough to realise the need for revitalising the state,

and had the necessary moral strength to impose their views. Although the

creation of modern Prussia took a long time, extending right through the

nineteenth century, these men did at least make a beginning.

Immediately after Tilsit, Frederick William III was reinstated in Königsberg.

A commission was appointed to purge the army command under Scharnhorst

and Gneisenau, who gradually enlisted the help of Grolman, Götzen and

Boyen. Another commission was appointed to carry out a special reorganisa-

tion of East Prussia in collaboration with Schrötter, its president; it included

Schön, Niebuhr and Altenstein. By 10 July Stein had been recalled on

Napoleon’s own advice – probably because he had been told of the good

impression he had made on the French in passing through Berlin on his

withdrawal to the Rhine provinces after his dismissal. He reached Königsberg

on 30 September, armed with a scheme for reform drawn up by him in the

course of the summer, the famous Nassau memorandum. A certain number

of these reformers, such as Schön, Schrötter, Clausewitz and Boyen, were

Prussian-born, but the most famous of them came from other parts of

Germany – men like Grolman, the son of a Westphalian magistrate; Götzen,

a Franconian count; Scharnhorst, a native of Hanover; Gneisenau, from

Saxony; Stein, who belonged to the Rhineland Ritterschaft . Some of them were

of humble origin. Scharnhorst’s father was a non-commissioned ofﬁ cer and

Gneisenau, though the son of an ofﬁ cer, had had a haphazard upbringing.

Prussia, which was less set in its ways, and had been disorganised by the

shocks of 1806, began to act as a focus for the national energies of Germany.

These men differed greatly in origin and in temperament, and it is not

surprising that there is not complete agreement about the spirit that inspired

them and their work. Some would see in them no more than men who

carried on the traditions of enlightened despotism in Prussia; but their will

to create a nation by associating the common people with their schemes of

regeneration clearly shows that such a classiﬁ cation is far too narrow for

them. It must not be forgotten that the Junkers were strongly opposed to

them, and that the king himself was not at all in their favour. Others have

seen them rather as the representatives of Germany’s moral and religious

culture, intent on linking up their reforms with the nation’s past; but though

they clearly betray the inﬂ uence of philosophical Idealism and Romanticism,

it is nonetheless true that some features of their schemes are more naturally

explained by Western inﬂ uences. No one, it is true, would deny the inﬂ u-

ence of England, which has already been discussed; nor can it be questioned

that Stein had read Montesquieu and had probably known the Physiocrats,

as well as the projects of Turgot and Dupont de Nemours. On the other

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hand, the inﬂ uence of the Revolution is a debatable point. This at any rate

must be conceded – that there were men in Prussia who were fairly familiar

with it. Frey, director of police at Königsberg, who prepared the municipal

regulations in 1808, had certainly studied the laws of the Constituent

Assembly, and Rehdiger, the Silesian noble who submitted to Stein a scheme

for a constitution, was well versed in Sieyès’s writings. Gneisenau seems to

have had the best grasp of the use that might be made of French experience:

What inﬁ nite powers lie dormant at the heart of the nation, quite undevel-

oped and unused! While an empire lies mouldering in powerless shame,

there is perhaps some Caesar guiding the plough in a wretched village, and

some Epaminondas who is eking out a living from the work of his hands.

It is, however, generally agreed that however much attention they paid to

England and France, they never dreamed of borrowing the English parlia-

mentary system or the French spirit of equality which was the essence of

the Revolution. In a modern Prussia as they conceived it, the middle classes

and the peasants were to be associated with the life of the state, but power

was to remain with the king. Castes were to disappear, but the social authority

of the Junkers would remain. This was an original scheme of things, half-

way between the Western countries and the monarchies of the ancien régime ,

though much more akin to the latter than to the former.

The task confronting the government in Königsberg was not an enviable

one. While the discussions with Daru were going on concerning the indem-

nity, attention was being given to the restoration of the devastated villages,

and the question of agrarian reform necessarily came to the fore. The cost of

rebuilding the farms fell upon the seigneurs. It was they who had to recon-

stitute the livestock, provide the peasants with seed and even supply them

with food in hard times like these. The seigneurs themselves were extremely

hard-pressed, and it had been necessary to grant them an indult or morato-

rium on their mortgage debts. In their eyes, the simplest course was to join

the devastated peasant holdings on to their own Gut , their own property, and

reduce the holders to the state of day labourers. The law forbade eviction and

demanded the abolition of the Bauernschutz ;

but it offered nothing in exchange,

and left the peasant as a mere Untertan (subject). But the government ofﬁ cials

did not view the matter in this light. Steeped in the lessons learnt from Smith

and Young, they declared themselves – Schön in particular – in favour of

large-scale cultivation, and had no objection to the abolition of the Bauernschutz ;

* [Protection of the peasantry by the state.]