War of the Fourth Coalition

• 1. Introduction

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  The War of the Fourth Coalition climaxed on the 27th of October 1806, when Napoleon walked into Berlin and stopped at the tomb of Frederick the Great. He told his marshals to show respect, adding, "If he were alive we wouldn't be here today." Earlier that same month, on the 9th of October 1806, Prussia had declared war on France and joined a renewed coalition. The coalition arrayed against Napoleon combined Prussia and Russia with Saxony, Sweden, and Britain. Except for Prussia, several coalition members had only just stopped fighting France in the Third Coalition, with no true peace between the two wars.

  What convinced Prussia to gamble on a fight it seemed unready to win? How did a Prussian army built on Frederick the Great's legacy collapse in a matter of weeks? And what new order did Napoleon impose on the continent once the guns fell silent?

• 2. The Road To War

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  Napoleon's victory at the Battle of Austerlitz had shattered the Third Coalition. He hoped this would bring a general peace, especially with Britain and Russia, his two remaining rivals. He also tried to isolate Prussia from their influence through a tentative alliance, while working to curb Prussian power among the German states.

  The death of William Pitt in January 1806 did not soften Britain's stance. Under the new Whig administration, London stayed committed to checking French power. Peace talks in early 1806 went nowhere, snagged on issues left unresolved since the Peace of Amiens broke down.

  One sticking point was Hanover, a German state joined to the British crown that France had occupied since 1803. The dispute over Hanover became a cause for war for both Britain and Prussia. It also dragged in Sweden, whose troops had been sent there to help liberate Hanover during the previous coalition's war. By April 1806, French forces ejected those Swedish troops, and war began to look inevitable.

  Apart from a naval clash or two and the Battle of Maida in southern Italy in July 1806, Britain and France fought no pitched battles in this coalition. Instead, the two powers escalated an economic war, each trying to choke off the other's trade.

  Russia spent most of 1806 recovering from the previous year's defeats. Napoleon had hoped for peace with Russia too, and a tentative treaty was signed in July 1806. Tsar Alexander I vetoed it, though, and the two countries stayed at war. Russia gave Prussia virtually no military help in the October battles that followed, since its armies were still mobilizing. It would not fully join the fight until Napoleon marched into Poland late that year.

  Prussia itself had stayed at peace with France the year before, though it came close to joining the Third Coalition. A French corps under Marshal Bernadotte had illegally crossed through neutral Ansbach, Prussian territory, on its march against Austria and Russia. Prussian anger over this trespass cooled once Austerlitz was won, and a peace convention was signed at Schönbrunn two weeks after the battle. That convention was made formal two months later, with a clause promising Hanover to Prussia in exchange for handing Ansbach to Bavaria.

  On the 15th of March 1806, Napoleon made his brother-in-law Joachim Murat ruler of the Grand Duchy of Berg and Duchy of Cleves. Murat then tactlessly ejected a Prussian garrison stationed there, drawing a stern rebuke from Napoleon himself. Relations soured further once Prussia learned that Napoleon had secretly offered to return Hanover to Britain during failed peace talks. That betrayal became one of the main reasons Prussia moved toward war that autumn.

  In July 1806, Napoleon formed the Confederation of the Rhine from various German states across the Rhineland and western Germany, naming himself its Protector. The Confederation was meant as a buffer against future aggression from Austria, Russia, or Prussia. Its formation delivered the final blow to the already moribund Holy Roman Empire, and the last Habsburg emperor, Francis II, formally abolished it. Napoleon folded many smaller former imperial states into larger electorates, duchies, and kingdoms. He elevated the electors of his allies Württemberg and Bavaria to the rank of king.

  The Confederation was above all a military pact. Member states had to supply troops as auxiliaries to the Grande Armée and help fund the French army occupying western and southern Germany. Prussia bristled at this French meddling in German affairs, carried out without even consulting Berlin. Napoleon had earlier tried to ease Prussian worries by suggesting it could lead a North German Confederation of its own. But the Hanover betrayal ended that possibility.

  In August 1806, Napoleon's forces arrested and executed the German nationalist Johann Philipp Palm for publishing a pamphlet attacking Napoleon and his occupying army. After delivering an ultimatum to Napoleon on the 1st of October 1806, Prussia, backed by Saxony, chose to fight the French Emperor directly.

• 3. Nineteen Days

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  In August 1806, King Frederick William III decided to go to war against France largely alone, save for distant Russia. His wife, Queen Louise, and Berlin's war party pushed him toward that decision. That same autumn, Tsar Alexander I visited the Prussian king and queen at the tomb of Frederick the Great in Potsdam. There, the two monarchs secretly swore to make common cause against Napoleon.

  Had Prussia joined Austria and Russia in the Third Coalition the year before, it might have contained Napoleon and averted the disaster at Austerlitz. Instead, Prussia had wavered during the swift French invasion of Austria and then hastily declared neutrality once that coalition was crushed. By the time Prussia moved against France in 1806, Russia was still remobilizing far away, leaving Saxony as Prussia's only real German ally.

  Napoleon could hardly believe Prussia would challenge him in a straight fight with almost no allies at hand. Most of the Grande Armée was still stationed deep in Germany, near the Prussian border. He rallied his soldiers by telling them Prussia's aggression had delayed their promised return home to enjoy the acclaim earned in the previous year's campaigns.

  Napoleon's initial maneuvers began in September 1806. In a letter to Marshal Soult laying out the campaign plan, Napoleon coined the phrase le bataillon-carré, or square battalion. In this system, the Grande Armée's corps marched together in close supporting distance, so any corps under attack could get quick help from the others. Napoleon then pushed the Grande Armée east of the Rhine and massed it along the Saxon frontier. To catch the Prussians unaware, he marched the army as a massive square through the Franconian Forest in southern Thuringia, in three parallel columns. Each corps stayed close enough to support the others, both inside its own column and across to the columns beside it.

  Lacking firm intelligence on the Prussian army's exact position, Napoleon still guessed correctly that it was concentrated near Erfurt and Weimar. Confusion reigned on the Prussian side too, where mistrust and division within the high command produced puzzling, uncoordinated marches. Napoleon planned to drive down the Saale valley toward Gera and Leipzig, then wheel west to cut the Prussians' line of retreat to Berlin. On the 8th of October 1806, after a cavalry skirmish at Saalburg, a Prussian division was brushed aside the next day at the Battle of Schleiz. On the 10th of October, Marshal Lannes crushed a Prussian division at the Battle of Saalfeld, where the popular Prince Louis Ferdinand was killed.

  The double Battle of Jena-Auerstedt fell on the 14th of October. At Jena, Napoleon crushed a Prussian force led by Frederick Louis, Prince of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, and Ernst von Rüchel. At the same time, his Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout routed the main Prussian army at Auerstedt, commanded by Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick. Napoleon fought only a portion of the Prussian army at Jena. At Auerstedt, though, a single French corps defeated the bulk of the Prussian force despite being badly outnumbered. Victory there was sealed once the Duke of Brunswick and fellow commander Friedrich Wilhelm Carl von Schmettau were both mortally wounded. Command then passed to the less capable King Frederick William, who believed he was facing Napoleon himself. The beaten remnants of the Prussian army from Jena then stumbled into the fighting at Auerstedt, deepening the collapse and triggering a full retreat. Napoleon later made Davout Duke of Auerstedt for this victory.

  During the fighting, Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte marched from Naumburg to Dornburg and only reached Apolda late in the day, slowed by poor roads. Apolda sat on high ground of real strategic value, between Auerstedt to the north and Jena to the south. Napoleon had ordered Bernadotte to seize it. Once Bernadotte set up his artillery on those heights, he forced the Prussians to withdraw from both Jena and Auerstedt. Believing Bernadotte a coward for missing both battles, Napoleon nearly had him court-martialed. On the 17th of October, though, Bernadotte mauled the previously untouched Reserve corps of Eugene Frederick Henry, Duke of Württemberg, at the Battle of Halle. He then chased it across the Elbe river, redeeming himself in Napoleon's eyes.

  Roughly 160,000 French soldiers fought against Prussia, with reinforcements crossing the Wesel bridgehead from the Kingdom of Holland as the campaign wore on. The French advanced with such speed that Napoleon destroyed the fighting power of a Prussian army nearly a quarter of a million strong. Prussia suffered 65,000 casualties, including the deaths of two members of its royal family, and lost a further 150,000 men as prisoners. It also lost over 4,000 artillery pieces and more than 100,000 muskets stockpiled in Berlin. French losses for the whole campaign ran to around 15,000.

  The bulk of the shattered Prussian army, and its displaced royal family, fled to refuge in East Prussia, near Königsberg. There, they eventually linked up with the approaching Russians. On the 11th of December 1806, the Treaty of Posen elevated Saxony to a kingdom, formally leaving the coalition to join Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine.

• 4. The Eastern Front

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  Late in 1806, French forces entered Poland. There, Napoleon created a new Duchy of Warsaw, to be ruled by his new ally Frederick Augustus I of Saxony. The area had already thrown off Prussian control through a popular uprising that grew out of anti-conscription riots. Napoleon then turned north, aiming to confront the approaching Russian armies and capture Königsberg, Prussia's temporary wartime capital.

  Twice, around the turn of the year, Napoleon tried and failed to trap General Bennigsen's Russian First Army, once near Pultusk and again around Heilsberg. A bloody, tactical draw at Eylau on 7-the 8th of February 1807 forced the Russians to pull back further north. Napoleon spent much of the spring rebuilding his army's strength before finally routing the Russians at Friedland on the 14th of June 1807. Three days later, Russia asked for a truce, and Tsar Alexander I met Napoleon to make peace at Tilsit on the 7th of July 1807.

  Sweden's main concern in the war was defending Swedish Pomerania. Though beaten at Lübeck, Swedish forces held the fort of Stralsund and pushed French troops out of Swedish Pomerania in early April 1807. On the 18th of April, France and Sweden agreed to a ceasefire. But Sweden's refusal to join the Continental System brought a second French invasion, led by Marshal Brune. Stralsund fell on the 24th of August after a siege, and Swedish troops abandoned the island of Rügen, leaving France in control of Swedish Pomerania. The resulting armistice, struck between Marshal Brune and Swedish general Johan Christopher Toll, let the Swedish army withdraw with all its weapons.

• 5. The Peace That Redrew Europe

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  On the 21st of November 1806, Napoleon issued the Berlin Decree, setting his Continental System into motion. The policy aimed to control trade across Europe without consulting any government involved. Its real goal was to strangle the British economy by shutting French-held territory to British trade. British merchants smuggled in goods regardless, and the Continental System never worked as the economic weapon Napoleon intended. Britain answered several months later with its own Orders in Council.

  Through the Treaties of Tilsit, signed in July 1807, France made peace with Russia, which agreed to join the Continental System. The terms were far harsher on Prussia. Napoleon seized much of its territory along the lower Rhine west of the Elbe, plus lands that had once belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Rhine territory became the new Kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by Napoleon's brother Jérôme Bonaparte. The Polish lands formed the new Duchy of Warsaw, a Polish client state. Continental Europe fell quiet at the war's end. Napoleon stood as master of nearly all of western and central Europe, apart from Spain, Portugal, Austria, and a handful of smaller states.

• 6. Aftershocks

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  After the Treaties of Tilsit, only Britain and Sweden remained at war with Napoleon among the coalition's major members. Russia then declared war on Britain. After a British attack on Copenhagen, Denmark-Norway joined Napoleon's side in what became known as the Gunboat War, opening a second front against Sweden. In May 1808, Britain sent a short expedition under Sir John Moore to Sweden, guarding against a possible Franco-Danish invasion.

  At the Congress of Erfurt in September and October 1808, Napoleon and Alexander agreed that Russia would force Sweden into the Continental System. That agreement led to the Finnish War of 1808-1809, keeping Sweden out of the Fifth Coalition that Austria would join against Napoleon in 1809. The war also split Sweden into two parts along the Gulf of Bothnia. The eastern half became the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland. Because of the Continental System, Britain remained at war with Napoleon and was untouched by the peace treaty.

  During negotiations with captured Swedes after the Battle of Lübeck, Marshal Bernadotte first drew the attention of Swedish authorities. That encounter set off a chain of events that eventually saw him elected heir to the Swedish throne. He was later crowned King Charles XIV John of Sweden.

  After Tilsit, the French Empire stood at what seemed its peak. Believing France free of any immediate obligations in central and eastern Europe, Napoleon set his sights on the Iberian ports of Portugal, Britain's long-time ally. His aim was to close off another stretch of Europe's coastline, a major channel for British trade. On the 27th of October 1807, Spain's Prime Minister Manuel de Godoy signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau with France. Under its terms, Spain would gain Portuguese territory in exchange for the alliance and passage for French troops. In November 1807, after Prince Regent John of Portugal refused to join the Continental System, Napoleon sent Jean-Andoche Junot's forces into Spain to invade Portugal. Junot's force secretly also aimed to pave the way for a full French occupation of Spain. Napoleon soon entangled France in Spain's internal royal power struggles, and the Spanish population turned against the French occupiers. That turn against the occupiers opened what would become the Peninsular War.