The Napoleonic Wars (4): The fall of the French empire 1813–1815
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Gregory Fremont-Barnes
GREGORY FREMONT-BARNES holds a doctorate in Modern History from Oxford University and has served as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He has written extensively on a broad range of military history, including Battle Story: Goose Green 1982, Waterloo 1815 and The Falklands 1982: Ground Operations in the South Atlantic, as well as editing Armies of the Napoleonic Wars and the three-volume Encyclopedia of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars .
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Reviews for The Napoleonic Wars (4)
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5“The Napoleonic Wars (4): The Fall of the French Empire” by Gregory Fremont-Barnes is the final book in Osprey’s Essential Histories Napoleonic Wars series and is an excellent brief overview of the final years of the Napoleonic Era. Mr. Fremont Barnes is quite succinct in getting to the heart of the battles, their dynamics, individual players including personal tribulations and foibles. That he is able to accomplish this task in such a quick and concise manner while being informative and entertaining is a grand sign of an accomplished historian. Personally I would rather that Mr. Fremont-Barnes had reconstructed a different early nineteenth century city rather than London, perhaps Paris, but that’s me being nitpicky.
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The Napoleonic Wars (4) - Gregory Fremont-Barnes
Background to war
Origins of Prussian and Russian hostility
Germany in ferment, 1807–1812
Prussia’s involvement in the campaigns of 1813–15 may be traced back to the autumn of 1806, when, having remained aloof from the Third Coalition, she foolishly confronted Napoleon with only Saxony at her side and with the Russian armies too far to the east to be of assistance before winter. Prussia had smarted at Napoleon’s creation of the Confederation of the Rhine in the heart of Germany, and the French refusal to cede Hanover (formerly a British possession) as promised, convinced King Frederick William III (1770–1840) that the time had come to put into the field his armies, widely acknowledged to be the best in Europe. The twin decisive victories at Jena and Auerstädt on 14 October destroyed the illusion of Prussia’s superiority and in a matter of weeks practically the whole of her forces were rounded up or besieged in fortresses and obliged to capitulate.
Seeing the vaunted Prussian ranks broken at Jena and Auerstädt was shocking enough for contemporaries, but to witness the systematic hunting down of the remnants of the army and the pitifully feeble resistance offered by fortresses throughout the kingdom in the weeks that followed was more than the nation could bear. Years of French occupation were to follow. The Treaty of Tilsit, concluded in July 1807, imposed subordination and in its wake Napoleon took deliberate and concerted measures to reduce not only Prussia’s pride and prestige, but her military and economic power. Her status as a great power was effectively lost as Napoleon raised the status of smaller German states like Saxony, to which he allotted all Prussian territory in her former Polish province, while imposing a series of harsh restrictions on Prussia, including a massive indemnity of several hundred million francs. The much revered Queen Louise (1776–1810), symbol of Prussia’s former grandeur and pride, had to endure numerous personal insults under French occupation, including Napoleon’s description of her as ‘the only real man in Prussia’, and the queen’s subjects attributed her premature death to such indignities. French troops occupied Prussia’s fortresses on the Oder and her ports on the Baltic, while the Continental System destroyed the kingdom’s seaborne commerce. Large parts of her territory were ceded to the French puppet state of Westphalia and her army was restricted to 42,000 men for 10 years. By all these measures and others, Prussia was left severely – but not fatally – weakened, and with her pride badly wounded she would remain a potentially dangerous time-bomb in the years after Tilsit.
The result was a movement of reform and growing patriotism, some of it exposed for all to see, though much of it kept secret so as to avoid French detection and suppression. Young Prussians established the anti-French Tugendbunde (‘League of Virtue’), and other societies which encouraged not simply a narrow form of Prussian patriotism, but a kind of pan-German unity that demanded freedom from foreign domination in general, but French in particular. At official levels reforms were undertaken by men like Baron Stein (1757–1831), who worked in a civilian capacity, and by Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) and Augustus von Gneisenau (1760–1831), who introduced new and sometimes radical changes within the army. Though aware of many of these activities, Napoleon did not fear Prussian attempts at social, economic and military reform, for he believed Frederick William to be too timid to challenge French might. In any event, his kingdom had neither the financial nor the military resources to wage a war of national