The Prussian army that marched south against Napoleon in October 1806 was, on paper, the same army Frederick the Great had led at Leuthen and Rossbach. Its regiments had the same names. Its drill manuals were unchanged. Its senior generals — Hohenlohe, Brunswick, Möllendorff — had served under Frederick himself, in some cases as young officers. They were on average sixty-two years old. They were, by general consensus of their own staff officers, the best army in Europe.
They were obliterated on the 14th of October 1806, in a single morning, by two French corps moving at speeds the Prussian command staff did not believe were physically possible. The Duke of Brunswick was shot through the eye early in the day and died of his wounds eleven days later. The army was routed at Jena. A second wing of it, simultaneously, was routed at Auerstedt twenty miles to the north. Within two weeks, almost every Prussian fortress west of the Vistula had surrendered. Some surrendered to French cavalry detachments that contained no infantry and no artillery. The fortress of Erfurt surrendered to a force smaller than its own garrison. The fortress of Stettin surrendered to a single French dragoon regiment under a colonel named Lasalle.
By the end of November 1806 the French army was in Berlin. Napoleon spent three weeks in residence at Charlottenburg. He visited the tomb of Frederick the Great at the Garrison Church in Potsdam, removed his hat, and is reported to have said, to his marshals, that if Frederick were still alive they would not be where they were. The marshals nodded. The sword of Frederick was taken from the tomb and sent to Paris.
Tilsit
The peace that ended the war was negotiated on a raft on the river Niemen at Tilsit — modern Sovetsk — in July 1807. The Tsar of Russia and the Emperor of the French met first, in private, for an hour. The King of Prussia, Frederick William III, was made to wait on the bank in the rain. When Napoleon finally received him, the terms were already settled.
Prussia lost almost half its territory. The provinces west of the Elbe — a quarter of the kingdom — were carved off to form a new client state, the Kingdom of Westphalia, given to Napoleon's brother Jerome. The provinces taken from Poland in the partitions of the 1790s were taken back, to form the Duchy of Warsaw. The remaining country was occupied by French troops at Prussian expense until an indemnity of a hundred and fifty-four million francs had been paid. The army was capped at forty-two thousand men. The state was, in any normal European sense, finished.
What followed was the strangest decade in the country's history.
The reformers
In the months after Tilsit, the king — a slow, anxious, but ultimately decent man — gave authority over the entire civil administration to a Westphalian baron named Karl vom Stein, whom he disliked personally but trusted to act. Stein was sixty-four years old. He believed, with a force that startled his colleagues, that Prussia's defeat had been a moral defeat as much as a military one. The country had failed because its institutions had been antique. Its peasants were serfs. Its bureaucracy was hereditary. Its army was officered by men chosen for birth rather than competence. Its towns had no self-government. Its Jews had no legal personality. None of these things could continue, he wrote, if Prussia was to be a country again.
The reform programme that followed was carried out, in pieces, by Stein, by his successor Karl August von Hardenberg, by the soldiers Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August von Gneisenau, and by the philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt. It was the most comprehensive peaceful reform of any European state in the nineteenth century.
Serfdom was abolished by the October Edict of 1807. Every Prussian became, for the first time in the country's history, a person before the law, free to choose a trade, to move between provinces, to marry whom he pleased. The Jewish population, around 125,000, was granted citizenship by the Edict of 11 March 1812. The army's officer corps was opened to commoners by competitive examination. Conscription on an equal basis, regardless of rank, was introduced. The towns were given municipal self-government by the Town Ordinance of 1808, the first such reform in Germany. Free trade in land was permitted. The guilds were broken. The administration was rebuilt from the ground up with a smaller, salaried, exam-recruited civil service answering to ministries rather than to the personal household of the king.
And in 1810, in a defeated capital under French occupation, with the treasury empty and the army demoralised, the kingdom founded a new university.
Humboldt's university
The University of Berlin opened its doors in October 1810, in a former palace on Unter den Linden that had been donated for the purpose by the king's brother Henry. The founding rector was the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The professor of theology was Friedrich Schleiermacher. The professor of physiology was Johann Christian Reil. The professor of history would shortly be Leopold von Ranke, who would invent the modern academic discipline of historiography from his lecture-hall in Berlin. The university would, within a decade, employ Hegel; within two, the chemist Heinrich Rose; within four, the brothers Grimm. By 1850 it would be the most important research university in the world.
It was Wilhelm von Humboldt's project. Humboldt — Alexander's older brother, the philologist and former Prussian ambassador to Rome — had been appointed minister of education in 1809 with the brief of rebuilding the Prussian school system from the elementary classroom upward. He spent eighteen months on the project, designed every layer of it, and resigned, exhausted, before he could see most of it implemented. What he left behind, in writing, was the blueprint of the modern German educational system: compulsory elementary schooling for both sexes; a network of secondary classical schools called Gymnasien, leading by competitive examination to the right to attend university; universities organised around the principle of Einheit von Forschung und Lehre — unity of research and teaching — in which the professor was expected to do original scholarship and the students were expected to participate in it.
This was not how universities worked elsewhere. In Oxford and Cambridge, the professors mostly held sinecures and the teaching was done by college tutors. In Paris, after the Revolution, the higher institutions were specialist schools — the École Polytechnique, the École Normale — that taught but did not research. The Humboldtian model, by uniting both, produced, within a generation, the world's first research universities. Every American university built in the second half of the nineteenth century — Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, the post-1862 land-grant universities — was modelled, consciously and explicitly, on Humboldt's design.
It is worth pausing here. A country that had just lost a war catastrophically, that was occupied by a foreign army, that had no money, and that did not know whether it would exist in five years, founded — as part of its response to defeat — what would become the model for modern higher education across the planet. This is the kind of fact about Prussia that gets lost between the spiked helmets and the goose-steps.
"The state must compensate, by intellectual strength, what it has lost in physical strength." — Frederick William III, on approving the University of Berlin, 1809
The war of liberation
The reckoning came when Napoleon overreached. The invasion of Russia in 1812 destroyed his Grande Armée; of the six hundred thousand men who had crossed the Niemen in June, fewer than a hundred thousand recrossed it in December. Prussia, having been forced to contribute a corps of twenty thousand to the invasion, watched its commander General Yorck negotiate a private armistice with the Russians at Tauroggen on the 30th of December 1812. The king, in Berlin, was furious for a fortnight, until he was not. By March 1813 Prussia had declared war on France.
The campaigns that followed — Lützen and Bautzen in the spring, the great victory at Leipzig in October 1813, the entry of allied troops into Paris in March 1814, the Hundred Days and Waterloo in the summer of 1815 — are the property of European history rather than Prussian history specifically. But the Prussian army that fought them was not the army of Jena. It was the new army, reformed under Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, officered by commoners as well as by Junkers, manned by conscripts who served three years and then passed into a reserve of trained men called the Landwehr. It was the prototype of every modern European army of the next century. The Waterloo campaign was won, in part, by the timely arrival of Blücher's Prussian corps on Wellington's left at five in the afternoon of the 18th of June 1815. They had marched, that day, through mud, from Wavre.
Vienna
The Congress of Vienna, which met to redraw the map of Europe in 1814 and 1815, was generous to Prussia. It returned the western provinces lost at Tilsit. It awarded, in compensation for some of the Polish territory the country did not regain, the Rhineland, Westphalia, and the northern half of Saxony. The new Prussia was the second-largest German state — after Austria — and the only one whose territory ran from the Vistula in the east to the Rhine in the west.
It was also a geographical absurdity. The kingdom was now divided into two halves separated by some two hundred miles of foreign territory — Hanover, the smaller German states, and the bishoprics of Hesse. To move from Berlin to Cologne, a Prussian official had to cross four other countries. This was the Congress's gift to the Hohenzollerns and the seed of fifty years of frustration. The Rhineland was Catholic, French in legal culture, and economically more advanced than the country it had just been given to. Brandenburg was Protestant, Prussian in legal culture, and poorer. The two would not be politically integrated until Bismarck made them so by making Germany.
For now, in the autumn of 1815, the Hohenzollern monarchy returned to its capital. The reforms slowed. The king, exhausted by twenty years of crisis, returned to the cautious, conservative instincts he had always preferred. Hardenberg died. Humboldt retired. Stein went home to his estates in Westphalia. The new University of Berlin opened its lecture halls. The Junker estates, which had nearly lost their serfs and their officer monopoly, recovered most of both. The army that had won at Leipzig stayed at thirty thousand peacetime strength.
The next great Prussian crisis, when it came, would not be a military one. It would be the question of what kind of state this re-made country was going to be — a question that the next half-century would be unable to settle, and that would, when it was finally settled, be settled by the man whose name comes first to mind when most people now think of Prussia.
End of Chapter VII