Battle of Jena–Auerstedt
On the 14th of October 1806, two battles were fought simultaneously on the plateau west of the river Saale, in what is today Thuringia, Germany. At Jena, Napoleon himself commanded. At Auerstedt, roughly a day's march to the north, a single French corps faced the main Prussian army alone. By nightfall, the Kingdom of Prussia lay broken, its army routed, its king in flight, and its capital soon to fall. What made that day so decisive was not merely French strength. It was the extraordinary contrast between the two armies meeting on that plateau. One had not changed its doctrines in over fifty years. The other had been forged into something the old European order had not seen before. The questions that follow from that morning are still debated: how does a military power sleepwalk into catastrophe? And how does a single general, outnumbered more than two to one, win a battle that his emperor could not even believe had happened?
Prussia in 1806 still venerated the military glory of Frederick the Great, but veneration had replaced reform. Prussian military doctrines had been unchanged for more than fifty years by the time the campaign began. Tactics were described as monotonous, and the wagon supply system was considered obsolete. The Prussian musket in use that year was a 1754 model, called "the worst in Europe" by one authority. Many of the soldiers in the royal army were not even Prussian nationals.
The command structure compounded every other problem. Key roles were divided between multiple officers, creating uncertainty in the coordination of field movements. The position of chief of staff alone was held by three different officers: General Phull, Colonel Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and Colonel Rudolf Massenbach. That confusion contributed to more than a month's delay before the final order of battle was even prepared. Five separate battle plans were put forward for discussion. Protracted deliberation shifted the initiative to the French before a single musket was fired.
There was no courier system in place for quickly transmitting messages. If orders changed, precious minutes were lost arranging the distribution of updates. Prussia had begun its mobilization almost a month before France, yet that head start dissolved in the fog of its own planning process. Facing the Prussians was Napoleon's Grande Armée, recently reorganized around the advanced corps system, which the French Emperor had refined greatly by 1805. The contrast would decide October.
Napoleon initiated his campaign against the Fourth Coalition by thrusting a force of 180,000 men through the Franconian Forest. The Prussian army, together with roughly 20,000 Saxon allies, waited with a combined strength of around 150,000 troops. Napoleon's plan was to force Prussia into a single decisive battle, as he had done at Austerlitz, and to pre-empt the Prussian offensive before it could gather momentum.
His main force was positioned in what is now Baden-Wurttemberg in southwest Germany. He chose a northeast advance into Saxony and on toward Berlin. The corps system that underpinned his army allowed for speed and flexibility that the Prussian command structure simply could not match. Individual corps could march, fight, and sustain themselves independently, then converge at the point of decision. At Jena, Napoleon arrived with roughly 48,000 men, then rapidly grew that force to 96,000 by exploiting his carefully planned and flexible dispositions. He also used the weather: a heavy fog on the morning of the battle gave cover to French movements, and the rugged terrain around Jena offered further advantage to a commander willing to use it.
The battle of Jena opened on the morning of the 14th of October with French attacks on both flanks of the Prussian line. The flanking attacks were designed to hold the Prussians in place while the central force came up. French General Saint-Hilaire achieved a breakthrough on the Prussian left, isolating that wing. Then Marshal Michel Ney, who had completed his maneuvers and taken his assigned position, decided to attack without orders.
Ney's initial assault succeeded, but he quickly found himself overextended and under heavy Prussian artillery fire. A Prussian general ordered a counterattack that enveloped Ney's units. Ney formed them into a square to protect all flanks. Napoleon recognized the crisis and ordered Marshal Jean Lannes to shift from the center to relieve Ney. That move left the French center exposed. Napoleon responded by committing the Imperial Guard to hold the center until Ney could withdraw. The Guard answered directly to Napoleon and could be redirected as the situation demanded. The rescue succeeded.
With Ney extracted, the Prussian commanders faced an opportunity they did not take. They failed to press against the weakened French center. One Prussian general later wrote that "the area around the entrance of the village was the scene of the most terrible blood-letting and slaughter." Around 1 p.m., Napoleon ordered both flanks to drive hard and break through, aiming to encircle the Prussian center while the French center pushed forward. The flanks broke through. The Prussian army was forced to withdraw, leaving behind 10,000 killed or wounded and 15,000 prisoners. Napoleon, believing he had faced the main Prussian force, did not yet know what Davout had done at Auerstedt.
General Etienne Gudin's Division was on the move from Naumburg before 6:30 in the morning. By 7 a.m. the 1st Chasseurs were stopped outside the village of Poppel by Prussian cavalry and artillery. The fog, which had been heavy, lifted just as they approached. What Davout's corps had run into was the main Prussian force of 64,000 men, including King Frederick William III himself, the Duke of Brunswick, and two field marshals. Davout's III Corps numbered far less than half that. Marshal Bernadotte, who had received orders to come to Napoleon's aid and whose route would have taken him near Davout, chose instead to follow the last written orders he held and march to Dornburg. He was within earshot of both battles. He aided neither.
Davout ordered Gudin to deploy at Hassenhausen. The Prussian divisional commander Friedrich Wilhelm Carl von Schmettau arrived to attack that village, supported by Blücher's cavalry on the left. Together they pushed Gudin's troops back. Reinforcements arrived in waves on both sides through the morning. The French squares came under grapeshot. When Davout and Gudin moved among their battalions, the only words heard from the French soldiers were: serrez vos rangs. Close your ranks.
Davout used a reverse-slope tactic, hiding his chasseurs a cheval behind a hill and releasing them at a critical moment to scatter Blücher's already-battered cavalry. Shortly before 10 a.m. the Duke of Brunswick ordered a full assault on Hassenhausen. By 10 a.m. Brunswick was carried from the field mortally wounded, and Schmettau was also badly wounded. Both Prussian commanders were gone within the same hour. The command structure, already fragile, collapsed. When Davout saw the Prussians wavering, he ordered his infantry to counter-attack at 11 a.m. By noon the Prussian center had broken across the Lissbach Stream. The King ordered a withdrawal. Davout's corps had lost 7,052 officers and men killed or wounded; Prussian casualties reached 13,000.
Napoleon's first reaction to the news from Auerstedt was disbelief. "Your Marshal must be seeing double!" he said, a reference to Davout's poor eyesight. As the picture clarified, the Emperor's tone shifted entirely. Davout was made Duke of Auerstedt. Marshal Lannes, who had played a decisive role at Jena, received no such honor.
Bernadotte's absence at both battles became controversial within a week. He had received a courier from Berthier in the early hours of the 14th stating that if the Prince of Ponte Corvo was with Davout, the two could march together, but that the Emperor hoped Bernadotte would be at his assigned position at Dornburg. Davout relayed this message when they met at 4 a.m. Bernadotte later argued the wording was equivocal and that he had complied with Napoleon's expressed wish. He also said he had not believed Davout's claim that the main Prussian force was before III Corps, since Napoleon had told him the main body was at Jena.
A later search of dispatches from Imperial Headquarters never found any order directing Bernadotte to march with Davout. The search did confirm Berthier's order sending Bernadotte to Dornburg. Napoleon later stated on St. Helena that Bernadotte's behavior was disgraceful, and that only his personal attachment to Bernadotte's wife, Desire Clary, Napoleon's own former fiancee, had kept him from ordering Bernadotte shot. Napoleon did send a severely worded reprimand but took no further action. Davout and Bernadotte became bitter enemies that lasted well beyond the campaign.
The twin defeats at Jena and Auerstedt did not end the campaign in a single afternoon. Over the following days, Prussian forces proved unable to mount any serious resistance to Murat's cavalry pursuit. The Capitulation of Erfurt on the 16th of October brought a large body of Prussian troops into captivity with almost no fighting. Bernadotte partially restored his reputation on the 17th by defeating Eugene Frederick Henry, Duke of Wurtemberg's reserve army at the Battle of Halle.
Napoleon honored Davout by giving him the distinction of entering Berlin first. Davout led his exhausted III Corps into the Prussian capital on the 25th of October. Hohenlohe's remaining force surrendered on the 28th of October at Prenzlau, followed shortly by the Capitulation of Pasewalk. Small Prussian columns were captured in rapid succession at Boldekow on the 30th of October, Anklam on the 1st of November, Wolgast on the 3rd, and Wismar on the 5th.
Gebhard von Blucher remained at large with roughly 21,000 Prussian field troops west of the Oder. Bernadotte, Murat, and Soult pursued him in what became known as the Pursuit of the Three Marshals. Blucher moved west toward neutral Denmark, but Danish forces massed on the border to block any crossing. He then violated the neutrality of the Hanseatic city of Lubeck, fortifying it with the hope of joining a Swedish contingent and commandeering ships. On the 6th and the 7th of November, Bernadotte's corps stormed the gates of Lubeck, poured into the streets, and broke hasty resistance while Soult's troops sealed the escape routes. Blucher's chief of staff, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, was captured inside the city. On the morning of the 7th, Blucher surrendered personally to Bernadotte, and 9,000 Prussian prisoners went into captivity with him.
The historian Martin van Creveld wrote that at Jena, Napoleon had known nothing about the main action of the day, had forgotten two of his corps, had failed to issue orders to a third and possibly a fourth, had been surprised by a fifth, and had a principal subordinate display disobedience that would have brought a lesser officer before a firing squad. Van Creveld called it "probably the great single triumph in his career" despite all those failures of command.
For Prussia, the meaning of the defeat cut deeper. Several men who would reshape the Prussian army were present at Jena and Auerstedt: Gebhard von Blucher, Carl von Clausewitz, August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and Hermann von Boyen. Their reforms, combined with civilian changes in the years that followed, began Prussia's transformation into a modern state. That modernized Prussia eventually took the leading role in expelling France from Germany. The humiliation of 1806 and the restoration of national honor that followed became a formative element of German nationalism.
Napoleon built a bridge in Paris named after the battle. When he was defeated, the Prussian forces of occupation wanted the bridge destroyed. Talleyrand temporarily renamed it after the Grand Army to persuade them otherwise. The Paris Metro station at that bridge still carries the name Jena today. Near the battlefield itself, a museum stands in the village of Cospeda, and every October the association Jena 1806 e. V. organizes commemorative events, with a larger gathering every five years.
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Common questions
When was the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt fought?
The twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt were fought on the 14th of October 1806 on the plateau west of the river Saale in Thuringia, Germany, at the outset of the War of the Fourth Coalition.
Who commanded the French forces at Jena and Auerstedt?
Napoleon I commanded at Jena personally. At Auerstedt, the French were led by Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout and his III Corps, which fought without support against the main Prussian force.
How did Davout defeat the Prussians at Auerstedt despite being outnumbered two to one?
Davout quickly assessed the terrain, deployed his forces at Hassenhausen, and used a reverse-slope tactic to ambush Blucher's cavalry at a critical moment. When both Prussian commanders, the Duke of Brunswick and Schmettau, were struck down by 10 a.m., the Prussian command collapsed and Davout counter-attacked at 11 a.m., routing the larger force.
Why was Marshal Bernadotte criticized for his role at Jena-Auerstedt?
Bernadotte was within earshot of both battles but took no steps to aid either Davout or Napoleon. He argued he was following Napoleon's written orders to position his corps at Dornburg rather than march with Davout. Napoleon later stated on St. Helena that Bernadotte's behavior was disgraceful, though he sent only a reprimand and took no further action.
What reward did Napoleon give Davout after the Battle of Auerstedt?
Napoleon made Davout Duke of Auerstedt in recognition of his victory. Napoleon also gave Davout the honor of leading his III Corps into Berlin first; Davout entered the Prussian capital on the 25th of October 1806.
What long-term effect did the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt have on Prussia?
The defeat exposed deep flaws in the Prussian military and state, spurring reforms led by officers who had served at the battle, including Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Clausewitz, and Blucher. These reforms transformed Prussia into a modern state, which later led the expulsion of France from Germany and formed a central element of German nationalism.
All sources
4 references cited across the entry
- 1BookThe German Way of War: From the Thirty Years' War to the Third ReichRobert M. Citino — University Press of Kansas — 2005
- 2BookNapoleon's military machinePhilip J. Haythornthwaite — Guild Puplishing — 1988
- 4Bewegte Bilder, bewegende BilderDonauwörther Zeitung — 12 May 2018