War of the Fourth Coalition

• 1. Introduction

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  The War of the Fourth Coalition ended on the 7th of July 1807 at the edge of a raft anchored in the middle of the Niemen River, where Napoleon Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander I met face to face for the first time. Within months of that meeting, Prussia had been stripped of vast territories, a new French client state called the Duchy of Warsaw had been carved into existence, and Russia had agreed to embargo British trade across the entire continent. The war that produced that outcome had lasted less than a year. It began in October 1806 with Prussia's declaration of war and was effectively decided in 19 days, when Napoleon's Grande Armee marched from the Saxon frontier all the way into Berlin. What drove Prussia to challenge the most powerful army in Europe with almost no allies ready to fight beside it? Why did Russia prove so much harder to defeat than Prussia had been? And what did the peace at Tilsit set in motion that Napoleon could not have fully anticipated?

• 2. The Road to War

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  William Pitt died in January 1806, but the British government he left behind stayed committed to checking French expansion. Peace talks between Britain and France early that year collapsed over issues left unresolved since the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens, and the fate of Hanover sat at the center of the dispute. Hanover was a German state that shared a monarch with Britain. France had occupied it since 1803, and its future had become a flashpoint pulling multiple powers toward war.

  Prussia had its own grievances accumulating well before it finally declared war. In 1805, Marshal Bernadotte had marched a French corps through Ansbach, violating Prussian territory without permission. Prussia swallowed that insult after the shock of Austerlitz and signed a convention with France at Schonbrunn. As part of a later formal treaty, France effectively promised to give Hanover to Prussia. Napoleon was simultaneously conducting secret peace negotiations with Britain in which he offered to return Hanover to the British crown. When Prussia discovered this double-dealing, the sense of betrayal hardened into a cause for war.

  Napoleon's formation of the Confederation of the Rhine in July 1806 made things worse. He drew the remaining German states west of Prussia into a military satellite, then elevated his brother-in-law Marshal Joachim Murat to rule the Grand Duchy of Berg and Duchy of Cleves on the 15th of March 1806. Murat promptly ejected a Prussian garrison stationed in his new domain. Napoleon rebuked him for the tactlessness, but the damage was done. A final provocation came in August 1806 when Napoleon ordered the arrest and execution of German nationalist Johann Philipp Palm for publishing a pamphlet attacking French conduct in Germany. Prussia issued an ultimatum on the 1st of October 1806, and nine days later it declared war.

• 3. Prussia's Fatal Miscalculation

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  King Frederick William III made the decision to fight in August 1806, influenced by his wife Queen Louise and the war party in Berlin. Russia was his nominal ally but was still far away remobilizing. The Electorate of Saxony was Prussia's only German partner. Napoleon found it almost impossible to believe Prussia would confront him in a straight fight with so little support, especially since the bulk of his Grande Armee was already massed close to the Prussian border.

  Napoleon laid out his campaign plan in a letter to Marshal Soult, introducing the concept he called the bataillon-carre, or square battalion. Under this system, the corps of the Grande Armee would march in three parallel columns through the Franconian Forest in southern Thuringia, each corps close enough to support the others in any direction. The formation allowed Napoleon to advance quickly despite having little intelligence on the exact position of the Prussian main army. He correctly estimated their concentration near Erfurt and Weimar and designed a thrust down the Saale valley toward Gera and Leipzig, swinging west to cut off the Prussian line of retreat toward Berlin.

  On the 9th of October, a Prussian division was brushed aside at Schleiz. The following day, Marshal Lannes crushed another Prussian division at Saalfeld, where the popular Prince Louis Ferdinand was killed. Four days later came the campaign's decisive blow. At the double Battle of Jena-Auerstedt on the 14th of October, Napoleon shattered Prussian forces at Jena while Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout, commanding a single French corps, routed the main Prussian army at Auerstedt despite being heavily outnumbered. The Duke of Brunswick and fellow commander Friedrich Wilhelm Carl von Schmettau were both mortally wounded at Auerstedt, leaving command to King Frederick William himself. When the broken remnants fleeing from Jena collided with the battle at Auerstedt, Prussian morale collapsed entirely. Napoleon later created Davout the Duke of Auerstedt in recognition of the feat.

• 4. Occupation and Collapse

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  Some 160,000 French soldiers took part in the Prussian campaign, with reinforcements crossing the Wesel bridgehead from the theater around the newly formed Kingdom of Holland. The speed of the French advance was unlike anything Prussia had experienced. In 19 days from the start of the invasion to the capture of Berlin, Napoleon had effectively destroyed a Prussian army that numbered close to a quarter of a million men.

  The human and material cost for Prussia was catastrophic. Prussian forces sustained 65,000 casualties, including the deaths of two members of the royal family. A further 150,000 Prussians were taken prisoner. The French captured over 4,000 artillery pieces and seized more than 100,000 muskets stockpiled in Berlin. French casualties for the entire campaign came to around 15,000.

  Napoleon entered Berlin on the 27th of October 1806 and went directly to the tomb of Frederick the Great. He told his marshals to show their respect, saying: "If he were alive we wouldn't be here today." It was a rare public acknowledgment of a rival's greatness. The Prussian royal family and whatever army remained fled to Konigsberg in East Prussia, eventually linking up with the approaching Russians. That connection kept a rump Prussian state alive and in the fight into 1807.

  On the 21st of November 1806, Napoleon issued the Berlin Decree, formally inaugurating the Continental System. The decree aimed to close all French-controlled territory to British trade. British merchants responded by smuggling goods across the blockade lines, and the system proved a weak economic weapon. The 11th of December 1806 brought one diplomatic consequence: the Treaty of Posen elevated Saxony to a kingdom after it allied with France and joined the Confederation of the Rhine, stripping Prussia of its sole German partner.

• 5. Russia Holds, Then Falls

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  Napoleon entered Poland toward the end of 1806 and immediately created the Duchy of Warsaw, placing it under the rule of Frederick Augustus I of Saxony, his new ally. The area had already seen a popular uprising against conscription that had escalated into open revolt before the French arrived. Farther north, Napoleon turned toward the approaching Russian armies and sought to capture Konigsberg, the temporary refuge of the Prussian royal family.

  Twice through the turn of the year, Napoleon tried to trap and destroy General Bennigsen's Russian 1st Army near Pultusk and in the vicinity of Heilsberg. Both attempts failed. The battle at Eylau on the 7th and the 8th of February 1807 was a tactical draw but a bloody one, forcing the Russians to pull back farther north without delivering the knockout blow Napoleon needed. He spent much of the spring resupplying and recuperating his forces before resuming operations.

  The campaign ended at Friedland on the 14th of June 1807. Napoleon routed the Russian army there, and three days later Alexander asked for a truce. The gap between the two great battles, Eylau in February and Friedland in June, was almost four months. Sweden's part in the war during this period was largely confined to defending Swedish Pomerania. Swedish forces lost at Lubeck but successfully defended the fort of Stralsund and pushed French troops out of Swedish Pomerania in early April 1807. France and Sweden agreed to a ceasefire on the 18th of April. Swedish refusal to join the Continental System prompted a second French invasion led by Marshal Brune. Stralsund fell on the 24th of August after a siege. The resulting armistice, negotiated by Brune and Swedish general Johan Christopher Toll, allowed the Swedish army to withdraw with all its munitions intact.

• 6. Tilsit and Its Consequences

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  The Treaties of Tilsit in July 1807 reshaped Europe. Russia agreed to join the Continental System and accepted a French sphere of influence over much of central Europe. The terms fell hardest on Prussia. Napoleon took Prussian territory along the lower Rhine west of the Elbe and combined it into a new Kingdom of Westphalia, which he placed under his brother Jerome Bonaparte. Territory Prussia had held in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became the Duchy of Warsaw.

  At the Congress of Erfurt in September and October 1808, Napoleon and Alexander agreed that Russia should force Sweden to join the Continental System. That agreement triggered the Finnish War of 1808-1809, which divided Sweden along the Gulf of Bothnia. The eastern part became the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland.

  During negotiations with captured Swedish officers after the Battle of Lubeck, Marshal Bernadotte had first come to the attention of Swedish authorities. That introduction set in motion a sequence of events that eventually led to Bernadotte being elected heir to the Swedish throne. He later reigned as King Charles XIV John of Sweden.

  With Continental Europe under his control, Napoleon turned his attention to Portugal. On the 27th of October 1807, Spain's Prime Minister Manuel de Godoy signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, granting French armies passage through Spain in exchange for a share of Portuguese territory. In November 1807, Prince Regent John of Portugal refused to join the Continental System. Napoleon sent an army under General Jean-Andoche Junot into Spain, nominally to invade Portugal but also to serve as the vanguard for an eventual French occupation of Spain. Napoleon drew himself into Spain's internal royal disputes, and the resulting backlash from the Spanish population opened the Peninsular War. When Austria re-entered the conflict in 1809, a Fifth Coalition formed, and the wars that Tilsit had appeared to close began again.