LITMIR.BIZ

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Frederick William could not procrastinate much longer. In the absence of any encouraging signal from Napoleon, and in view of the fact that over two-thirds of his army was by then operating in defiance of him, he made a move. On 22 January 1813 he left Berlin, with its French garrison and swarms of French officials, for Breslau (Wrocław), the capital of his province of Silesia. Although the French ambassador Saint-Marsan accompanied him, the King felt less under surveillance there. While making repeated professions of loyalty to Napoleon, he sanctioned the formation of a volunteer corps of Jägers and the call-up of all men aged between twenty and thirty-four, ostensibly in order to be in a position to offer his ally Napoleon fresh troops in the spring.

      On 9 February he sent Colonel Knesebeck to Alexander’s headquarters at Kalisch (Kalisz) to seek assurances that, provided he did not take Napoleon’s side in the forthcoming conflict, Prussia was not going to be pushed westwards and turned into some kind of buffer state. Alexander was not best pleased by Frederick William’s envoy. Knesebeck asked the Tsar to dismiss Stein and to promise that he would hand over Prussia’s old Polish provinces, incorporated into the grand duchy of Warsaw in 1807, which were now under Russian occupation. Alexander took this approach as an expression of a lack of faith in his magnanimity. Ignoring Knesebeck, he despatched Stein to Breslau with a letter to Frederick William and the draft of a treaty of alliance between them. Stein’s arrival on 25 February was most unwelcome to the King.

      Time was running out, as the Russian armies covered ever greater areas of his kingdom, and the German patriots who marched with them incited his subjects to rise and fight regardless of their King. On 19 February Fichte had ended a lecture he was giving at the university in Berlin with the words: ‘This course will be suspended until the close of the campaign, when we will resume it in a free fatherland or reconquer our liberty by death.’ Young men from all over Germany flocked to join a Freikorps under Adolf von Lützow, dedicated to the liberation of Germany. A wave of excitement rippled across the country. ‘German spirit, German courage raised hopes of better days,’ wrote the patriotic salonière Caroline Pichler, noting that the voices of young men had a fresh, warlike ring.¹³

      Frederick William was cornered, and on 27 February he signed the treaty brought by Stein. It was ratified and dated at Kalisch on 1 March. Frederick William set to work raising troops and, as a token of reconciliation with his wayward army, founded the Order of the Iron Cross. Two weeks later Alexander joined Frederick William at Breslau, and on 16 March Prussia declared war on France. Alexander and Frederick William were, for better or worse, allies.

      The alliance placed Frederick William in a subservient position. The one promise that he had extracted from Alexander was that in a secret article of the treaty he solemnly undertook ‘not to lay down arms as long as Prussia will not be reconstituted in statistical, geographical and financial proportions equal to those she had before’ 1806. Since Alexander was already in possession of all the territory Prussia had lost then, Prussia could only wait for him to either give it back, which seemed unlikely, or to use his power to obtain a comparable tranche of land for her from future conquests elsewhere in Germany. The word used, ‘equivalents’, was harmless enough, but it left unanswered the question of where they were to be found, and who was to be dispossessed in order to provide them – every piece of land belonged to somebody.¹⁴

      While people all over Europe who had grown tired of Napoleonic dominance saw Alexander as a liberator, few appreciated that he had assumed a right to play the decisive role in the future arrangement of Europe. It was not merely a question of his having triumphed over Napoleon. Over the past few years he had come to view his struggle with the French Emperor not only as a personal contest, or as a clash between two empires, but as a veritable Armageddon between good and evil.

      The Tsar’s idealism coupled with his political disappointments and humiliations on the battlefield had led him towards mysticism. His close friends included followers of Saint-Martin, Swedenborg and Lavater, and he was conversant with the literature of mysticism and with German pietism. As he watched his country being invaded and ravaged in 1812, he had sought solace in resignation to the will of God, and when the fortunes of war swung back in his favour he saw it as a manifestation of that will. From there it was but a short step to seeing himself as its instrument. He interpreted the suffering his country and its people had endured over the previous year as a purifying preparatory ordeal, and saw in it a kind of moral capital that gave him an authority superior to that of any of the other monarchs of Europe.

      Like Stein and many German patriots, he had come to see the war as a crusade, not so much against France as against what France stood for – revolution, moral depravity and the usurpation of power. It was this last, Napoleon’s almost careless trampling of the ancient rights of other monarchs and his brazen use of force to install and dismiss sovereigns, that offended most. As he prepared to embark on the next stage of his crusade, the liberation of Germany from the usurper, Alexander called on her legitimate princes to join it.

      A proclamation issued on his behalf by Field Marshal Kutuzov stressed that the armies of the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia were entering Germany with the sole aim of liberating her people and their princes and restoring to them their ‘imprescriptible rights’. ‘May every German worthy of the name join us with vigour and promptitude,’ it continued. ‘Let everyone, whether Prince or noble or from the ranks of the people, support with their wealth and their blood, with their body and their life, the liberating intentions of Russia and Prussia.’

      The proclamation announced that the two monarchs had decreed the dissolution of the Rheinbund and intended to replace it with something modelled on ‘the ancient spirit of the German People’. And it contained a barely veiled threat to any who would not join them. ‘Their Majesties therefore demand a faithful and complete cooperation, particularly from each German Prince, and are pleased to hope in advance that there will not be found one among them who, wishing to betray the cause of Germany, will thereby deserve to be destroyed by the force of public opinion and by the power of the arms taken up so justly by them.’¹⁵

      The convention signed by Russia and Prussia at Breslau on 19 March 1813 was more businesslike and precise. It stipulated that all ‘liberated’ territory would be divided into five districts and placed in the hands of a Central Administrative Council directed by Stein, which would take over the business of collecting taxes, marshalling resources and raising troops. It also restated that all the German rulers would be invited to join the cause, and made it clear that ‘any Prince who does not answer this call within a specified period will be threatened with the loss of his state’.¹⁶

      It was a curious way to proclaim a crusade for legitimacy against the usurper, and Frederick William’s chancellor, Hardenberg, for one, was afraid that ‘this appeal to the passions of the day, even to democratic ideas, so unexpected on the lips of two absolute monarchs, could lead to grave problems in the future’. That was to prove something of an understatement. The two monarchs had in effect adopted the language of the French Revolution and the methods of Napoleon, thereby undermining their own credibility and robbing themselves of the only weapons they would be able to use against the unwonted passions they were arousing.¹⁷

       3 The Peacemakers

      Nobody was more alarmed by the new alliance between Russia and Prussia than the Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Klemens Wenceslas Lothar von Metternich, and no power stood to lose more by radical developments in Germany than Austria. She was, in a different way from Prussia, possibly the most vulnerable political unit in Europe.

      Her sovereign had been crowned in 1792 as the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. Besides this prestigious but empty role, he had inherited the huge antiquated realm of the house of Habsburg, an accretion of centuries of conquest, diplomacy and dynastic marriage. It was not long before he had to start ceding outlying

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