Soldier Emperor
Prussia in the Napoleonic Wars,
Part One
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2023

When Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French in late 1804, sparking renewed war across Europe, Prussia ranked as the least great of the great powers. A series of forceful, competent rulers had expanded the impoverished electorate into a powerful kingdom over the course of a century and a half. But that run ended with the death of Frederick II (“The Great”) in 1786.

His nephew and successor, Friedrich Wilhelm II, ruled for the next 11 years taking most of his advice from a circle of religious mystics and his mistress, the “Beautiful Wilhelmine.” Friedrich Wilhelm II had little interest in military or governmental affairs, preferring to see himself as a patron of the arts and upholder of traditional Protestant values. Yet under his reign, Prussia at least superficially reached new heights of power: the regular army, at some 250,000 men, had never reached a greater peacetime strength. And with the annexation of Warsaw and the surrounding regions in the 1795 Third Partition of Poland, Prussia reached its greatest territorial extent to date.

Prussia’s great power status depended solely on the size and reputation of its army. While the Royal Prussian Army of this period is often described as fossilized in the drills laid down by Frederick the Great, this isn’t exactly true. Friedrich Wilhelm II started his reign by abolishing the worst of the barbaric punishments his uncle had inflicted on his soldiers. To improve recruiting and retention, the new king authorized regimental schools for soldiers’ children and family allowances for their fathers. Regiments were also to organize invalid companies to give soldiers too badly injured to return to service at least minimal duties for which they could be paid. Retired sergeants now had a path to become schoolmasters. A recruit joining the Royal Prussian Army could count on lifelong security.

The army of Frederick the Great in action. Kolin, 1757.

The king felt this important, because Prussia with its small population base could not provide enough recruits to fill the ranks without reliance on foreign enlistment. And foreigners were unlikely to sign up for the Army of Frederick the great if it only offered pain and death.

The army also added permanent light infantry establishments. Ten men in each battalion would become sharpshooters; in practice, this just became a means to identify and train potential non-commissioned officers. But 20 new battalions of green-uniformed fusiliers, trained in the open-order tactics that the Austrian light troops had used so effectively against the Prussians in the Seven Years’ War and the Potato War, were raised and performed very well during the early campaigns in France. Unlike the line battalions, from which the initial manpower had been drawn, commoners could be commissioned in the fusiliers.

But all of that innovation came at a cost – it was expensive, and it broke the Prussian budget. To compensate, the Army curtailed training expenses. Soldiers found themselves issued a single round for live-fire exercises.  While other nations issued new weapons, the Prussians continued to carry the Model 1740 Potsdam musket. Prussian artillery followed outmoded organization, with the 6-pounder Model 1754 battalion cannon scattered among the infantry for direct support and the 12-pounder Model 1717 “Brummer” equipping the heavier batteries, what Carl von Clausewitz would describe as “the worst in Europe.”

Meanwhile, Prussia had annexed a huge swath of new territory that included almost no German-speakers. Almost all of the petty officials, schoolmasters, and tax collectors of South Prussia (Warsaw and its environs) had to be imported. While the new Polish lands added 1.5 million new subjects to the Prussian crown, they produced very little revenue.

Prussian infantry drill on the Schlossplatz, Berlin.

In 1787, the new king Friedrich Wilhelm committed his army to intervene in a Dutch political crisis that neared civil war, to restore his brother-in-law, William V of Orange, as Stadtholder. They accomplished that swiftly; despite French threats to fight the Prussians, Louis XVI’s forces remained in their camps. The Prussian king demanded that the Stadtholder pay his army’s expenses, but settled for a fraction of the cost.

Two years later, it was Louis facing a widespread uprising, and two years after that Friedrich Wilhelm met with Austrian Emperor Leopold II to set aside their nations’ enmity to forge an alliance aimed at suppressing revolution. Prussia went from the brink of war with Louis XVI to all-in on his restoration just four years later.

Almost a year passed before the allied army lurched forward, sparked by the French National Assembly’s declaration of war. Prussia sent 45,000 troops into France (along with 29,000 Austrians and perhaps 5,000 French royalists of dubious value) under Charles William Ferdinand, the Duke of Brunswick, considered Europe’s leading soldier.

Louis-Joseph, the Prince of Condé, led the royalist force, which he rather humbly labeled the Army of Condé. He contributed little, except to draft what became known as the Brunswick Manifesto, promising (in the tortured language of the time) “an exemplary and forever memorable revenge” on the city of Paris should the slightest harm come to the king or royal family.

Predictably, the manifesto instead enraged the populace. It reached Paris on 1 August 1792, and nine days later a vast mob simply rolled over and slaughtered the Swiss mercenaries protecting the Tuileries Palace. That set off a chain of events that led to the abolition of the monarchy, the execution of Louis XVI and his wife, and more than two decades of war. Just how much of a role the Manifesto itself played is still debated, but the Prussian-led invasion most definitely gave the hard-core revolutionaries a huge boost in support. In September, Brunswick fought a drawn battle with the revolutionary army – a mix of old regime regulars and newly-enrolled volunteers – at Valmy, which the revolutionaries spun as a decisive victory.

Brunswick retreated back into the Holy Roman Empire, and the French followed. They overran much of the Rhineland, bringing German revolutionaries to power. In the fortress-city of Mainz, the locals set up a republic – the first outburst of democracy on German soil – which fell under siege in the spring of 1793 as Brunswick set about ejecting the French from Imperial territories.

The growth of Prussia, up to 1806 (open in new tab to embiggen).

Driving the French out of Mainz and scattering their German collaborators would be the Prussians’ final contribution to the War of the First Coalition against the French revolutionaries. The king had already sent peace feelers to the French, causing Brunswick to resign his command. Prussian and French representatives gathered in Switzerland, but – preserving the letter of Friedrich Wilhelm’s undertaking to Emperor Leopold II and his successor, Emperor Franz II – they did not meet face-to-face. Lackeys shuffled written proposals between their hotel rooms and in April 1795 they agreed to the Peace of Basel.

Prussia in effect ceded the left (western) bank of the Rhine River to the French, a long-standing goal that the French kings had never realized. The Prussians would keep the bargain for the next 11 years, and now turned their attention to Poland, pressing for the third and final partition of their eastern neighbor. While that brought a great deal of tension with the Austrians, Prussia’s former allies were far too busy conducting their own ongoing war with the French.

Friedrich Wilhelm II died in 1797, with his son Friedrich Wilhelm III taking the throne at the age of 27. The new king had served as a junior officer in the just-concluded war, though of course kept well away from potential harm, and he saw himself as the highest-ranking servant of the state rather than its embodiment. Friedrich Wilhelm III was shy and withdrawn, never using personal pronouns, but he became a popular monarch anyway thanks to his forceful, outgoing young wife, the buxom blue-eyed beauty Queen Luise.

While Prussia sat out for over a decade, warfare changed. Much larger armies now took the field, as the old regimes struggled to match the huge forces mustered by France’s universal conscription. Those huge new forces required new means of organization, logistics and even strategy, worked out by the French and haltingly copied by their enemies. The philosophy of war itself had changed; even the rigidly conservative Habsburg forces had begun to appeal to patriotism and the individual honor of rank-and-file soldiers.

Prussian military writers like Gerhard Scharnhorst and Hermann von Boyen took note, and in 1801 the Prussian Army founded what would become the War Academy, with Scharnhorst, formerly a Hannoverian officer, as the star of its faculty. But a peacetime army had far less incentive to reform and innovate than their Austrian rivals who had direct experience of bitter defeat.

Once Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in France, Friedrich Wilhelm III was content to play along with him. In late 1805, France and Prussia signed a treaty of friendship, including a secret protocol assigning Hannover to Prussia in exchange for three scattered territories. Prussia had long desired the Electorate of Hannover, ruled in personal union with the British crown, and occupied the electorate several times at French instigation. The Prussians also joined the French-led commercial boycott against English goods.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his new puppy. He misses his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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