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

When Austria and Russia went to war with Napoleon in 1805, Prussia declined to join them. The Austro-Prussian rivalry of the previous century still informed opinion in Berlin. The French smashed this Third Coalition, winning a series of decisive battlefield victories that forced the Austrians to sue for peace and drove the Russians out of central Europe. The aftermath allowed Napoleon to re-order Europe as he wished, treating kings and countries like pieces on a wargame map.

Prussian prestige suffered as Napoleon shuffled the cards. He gathered most of the tiny German micro-states that had formed the Holy Roman Empire into larger entities, and then gathered those new vassals into the Confederation of the Rhine, with himself as its Protector. Two Electors, those of Württemberg and Bavaria, became kings, a title the Prussian Hohenzollerns had struggled for decades to obtain and these upstarts now gained with ease. Napoleon did not consult the Prussians regarding any of those moves, let alone their approval.

As the slights piled up, the Prussians learned that Napoleon had also promised Hannover to Britain as part of a peace deal. That would be the last straw, as Friedrich Wilhelm III finally gave in to the vociferous war party, led by his wife, Queen Luise and including most of Prussia’s top generals.

Prussia mobilized through August and September, moving forward into the territory of their ally Saxony. Napoleon, unwilling to believe that the Prussians would be so stupid as to fight him alone without Russian or Austrian support, only slowly followed suit. The Russians had indeed promised their support, but most Prussian generals advocated an offensive into Germany. Christian Karl von Massenbach, the quartermaster-general known as the “evil genius of Prussia,” insisted that a parade would intimidate Napoleon into submission. Scharnhorst, the chief of staff, offered a radically different option: to fall back across Prussia, fighting a series of delaying actions, until the Prussians could join with the promised Russian reinforcements. Then the allies could resume an advance with their full strength.

Napoleon after the Battle of Jena.

Scharnhorst’s sensible concept received universal rejection, and the Prussians had not settled on a campaign plan when the king sent Napoleon an ultimatum. Timed to give Napoleon no time to respond, it arrived in Paris on 2 October 1806, requiring a response by the 8th or else a state of war would exist. Napoleon received the missive on the 7th and coincidentally had already scheduled his offensive for the morning of the 8th.

The Prussian Army went to war without a corps structure, in an unwieldly organization of two armies, led by the now-aged Duke of Brunswick and Prince Friedrich Ludwig von Hohenlohe, plus several additional corps-sized detachments. Without intermediate headquarters staffs to control smaller formations, the army headquarters had to issue very detailed orders, in turn slowing the army’s reaction time to a glacial pace. An outdated logistical system relying on magazines and wagons trains made the army even slower.

Prussia also went to war without her full strength. Almost one-third of the army’s 250,000 effectives went into fortress garrisons, and retired or furloughed soldiers were not recalled to the colors. Prussia fielded 58 two-battalion infantry regiments, two Guard infantry regiments, one jäger regiment with three battalions, 27 grenadier battalions and 24 fusilier battalions. The cavalry numbered 13 regiments of cuirassiers, 14 of dragoons and eight of hussars, plus one regiment of Polish hussars drawn from noble youth. Seventy-one artillery batteries rounded out the force. Hundreds of Polish soldiers conscripted from the territories seized during the 1793 Second Partition of Poland took advantage of the forward deployment to desert to the French.

When the French moved forward, they lacked the parade-ground precision of the Prussians, or their sharp, well-kept uniforms – French soldiers had not been issued fresh kit since before the opening of the 1805 campaign against Austria, and they looked much like a massive band of armed vagrants.

The French defeated a Prussian division on the 9th, and crushed another on the 10th, but the main battles erupted on the 14th. Napoleon defeated Hohenlohe’s smaller army at Jena, while Louis-Nicholas Davout routed Brunswick’s main army at Auerstadt. Three days later Jean Bernadotte defeated the Prussian Reserve Army at Halle, and the army of Frederick the Great began to disintegrate. The French entered Berlin on 25 October, and Hohenlohe surrendered the remnants of his army three days later. Smaller detachments gave up as well, while others fought hopeless engagements – Gebhard von Blücher headed for the neutral city of Lübeck but the French stormed the walls and forced his surrender. The small fortified port of Kolberg on the Baltic coast managed to fend off the French (mostly Poles, Italians and Germans) until news arrived of an armistice in early July 1807.

Prussia lost everything but the orange parts at Tilsit. Open in new tab to embiggen.

In November, uprisings broke out against Prussian rule in the Polish provinces, where volunteers flocked to join the new regiments established by the French. By the end of the year, Polish subjects of Friedrich Wilhelm III fighting for the French outnumbered the remnants of the king’s army. Those of the Prussian Army’s Polish hussar regiment who had not already deserted went over to the French in a body, and fought against the Prussians as a unit.

At that point, only one Prussian force remained in the field – 68-year-old Anton Wilhelm von L’Estocq with about 15,000 men who had garrisoned the formerly Polish territories in the far eastern reaches of the kingdom. L’Estocq and his men actually performed well in the February 1807 Battle of Eylau, fighting alongside Lev Bennigsen’s Russians, and again at the Battle of Heilsberg in June.

Russian Tsar Alexander I and Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III jointly asked Napoleon for an armistice on 25 June; with his army badly needed rest and replenishment, the Emperor of the French agreed. Alexander and Napoleon met on a raft moored in the middle of the Nieman River between Russian and Prussian territory; they left Friedrich Wilhelm standing on the riverbank, left out of the talks that would determine his kingdom’s fate.

Friedrich Wilhelm III summoned his then-pregnant wife, Queen Luise, from Memel in East Prussia where the royal family had fled. Luise requested and was granted a private interview with Napoleon; the Emperor of the French had labeled her a “slut” while she had responded with “monster,” but now the queen laid on all of her considerable charm. Napoleon was charmed enough to accept a series of dinner invitations. She flirted, she cried, she deployed all of her considerable charm. When that failed, she simply threw herself physically at his feet and begged that Prussia not be wiped off the map of Europe – and that the kingdom retain the strategic fortress of Magdeburg.

“I am an oilcloth,” Napoleon wrote to his wife, Josephine, “off which all that sort of thing runs.”

Prussia would survive, and though Napoleon later claimed that the queen’s intervention had nothing to do with it, he did proclaim her “the only real man in Prussia” and she became even more popular at home. But Napoleon did take away Magdeburg, and he also stole Frederick the Great’s sword and sash.

All of Prussia’s lands west of the Elbe River went to Napoleon’s newly-constituted German puppet states (chiefly the new Kingdom of Westphalia). The provinces Prussia had taken from Poland became the new Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Even Russia, Prussia’s ostensible ally, took a small slice. All told the kingdom lost over half of its territory and well over half of its population, with even greater losses to her tax base – the ceded territories included its richest and most productive lands.

French troops continued to occupy Prussian cities and towns, and in the September 1808 Treaty of Paris, Napoleon agreed to withdraw all of them except for those in three key fortresses. In exchange, Prussia accepted a war indemnity of 140 million thalers (the kingdom’s total tax revenue for the last pre-war year, 1805, had been 40 million thalers. Unless things changed, Prussia would be paying for Friedrich Wilhelm’s foolish war for many decades to come.

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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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