The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period

Frederick William II (reigned 1786–97) was not nearly so successful a ruler as his uncle. Although he purchased the margravates of Ansbach and Bayreuth in southern Germany and obtained a far larger territory in the east through the Second and Third Partitions of Poland, he had no success against the armies of Revolutionary France. By the Peace of Basel (1795), he consented to France’s eventual annexation of the German lands west of the Rhine. Moreover, Frederick William’s management of the Prussian economy was less prudent than his predecessor’s and finally brought the state’s finances into disorder. His son, Frederick William III (reigned 1797–1840), pursued at first a foreign policy of caution and neutrality with respect to France and Napoleon I, and, when at last he went to war in 1806, it was too late to avert catastrophe. Napoleon’s overwhelming defeat of the Prussians in the battle of Jena was followed by the rapid collapse of the state. By the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) the king ceded all his possessions west of the Elbe River and all that had been gained under the Second and Third Partitions of Poland, together with the southern part of what had been gained under the First, so that the monarchy was reduced to Brandenburg, Silesia, the Pomeranian provinces, northern West Prussia (without Danzig [now Gdańsk, Poland]), and East Prussia. Moreover, the state was required to pay an exorbitant contribution to Napoleon’s finances and to accept a French occupation of much of its territory.

The backwardness of Prussia was revealed by the disaster of 1806. Administrative, social, and military reforms were clearly overdue, and the king’s chief minister, Karl Stein, seized the opportunity to introduce them. His basic idea was to evoke a positive consciousness of solidarity with the state by allowing the citizens to take a more active part in public affairs. This idea underlay the emancipation of the serfs (begun in 1807), the measures for local self-government, and the reshaping of the central government. Even after Stein was dismissed from office at Napoleon’s behest in November 1808, the work of reform continued under Karl von Hardenberg, Prussia’s chancellor of state, or prime minister, from 1810.

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Among educated groups, meanwhile, the Napoleonic domination of Europe was provoking an upsurge of national sentiment, which was felt in Prussia no less strongly than in the other German states and was eventually to manifest itself in the War of Liberation (1813–14). The reform of the Prussian army was begun by Gerhard von Scharnhorst, who thus prepared it for the part that it was to play.

At the same time, the Romantic movement in the intellectual and artistic fields further stimulated patriotism and the cult of liberty, to the service of which it even brought its interpretation of history. The foundation, in 1809, of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, with Wilhelm von Humboldt as its chief promoter, affirmed Prussia’s spirit in the aftermath of defeat.

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Hardenberg adroitly steered Prussia through the difficulties of 1812, when Prussia and Austria, in enforced alliance with France, participated in Napoleon’s attack on Russia. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was the signal for a rising against the French. The Prussian army, with Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher and August Neidhardt von Gneisenau as its leaders, took a major part in the Battle of Leipzig, in the campaign of 1814 in France, and in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

The Congress of Vienna (1814–15) did not restore Ostfriesland, Lingen, Hildesheim, Ansbach, or Bayreuth to Prussia, and the latter recovered nothing of its gains under the Third Partition of Poland and regained only Danzig and a few other towns under the Second. But the rest of what Prussia had possessed in 1803 was restored practically entirely by the Congress, with considerable additions of new territory. This new territory comprised (1) areas taken from the kingdom of Saxony, which were merged with older Prussian territories on the west bank of the lower Elbe to form the Prussian province of Saxony; (2) areas west and east of the Rhine River, which were merged with older Prussian territories to form the Prussian Rhine province and the province of Westphalia; and (3) the formerly Swedish part of Vorpommern, with Rügen Island, which was merged with the rest of the Pomeranian territory to form the province of Pomerania, or Pommern. Moreover, by the Peace of Paris (1815), France ceded Saarlouis and Saarbrücken to Prussia, which incorporated them in the Rhine province. Thus, after 1815 Prussia stretched uninterrupted from the Neman River in the east to the Elbe River in the west, and west of the Elbe it possessed large (if discontinuous) territories in western Germany.

With its major territorial axis shifted from eastern Europe to western and central Germany, Prussia was henceforth the only great power with a predominantly German-speaking population. It was thus Austria’s potential rival for hegemony in the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund), which the Congress also created.