declaration of war, Alexander declined to have anything to do with it.
Thirdly, the Austrians knew, even before Talleyrand confirmed it, that
France was war-weary and the necessary moral commitment for a major
war was lacking. This in turn connected with the final consideration; that
there was a new spirit of nationalism abroad in Germany and in Austria.
After Jena, Prussian intellectuals like Fichte, Arndt and Schlegel began
campaigning for a unified Germany as the way to defeat Napoleon.
Within the government reformers like Friedrich Stein had the upper
hand for two years. They emancipated the serfs, founded universities,
shook up the old bureaucracies and, most ominously, reformed the army
with a unified Ministry of War and a Commission for Military
Organization, which oversaw a new Landwehr militia (finally called up in
r8r3) and its Trojan horse, the Krumper system of short-service training.
Stein eventually proved the truth of the proposition that the key to
Napoleon's imperial power was his alliance with Europe's old elites. The
landowning Junkers, fearing that they were the eventual target of
Napoleon's reforms, divulged the scope of his ambitions to the French.
Napoleon's reaction was swift. From Spain he imposed a new Convention
on the Prussians, including an order to exile Stein; he backed this with an
imperial edict declaring Stein to be an enemy of France and the
Confederation of the Rhine.
Although the Prussian middle classes had originally welcomed the
French Revolution, the trauma of Jena turned them into a curious
hybrid, liberal reformers at home, rabid Francophobes in foreign affairs.
Over and over again the soul-searching Prussians asked the same
questions: how was it that in late r8o6 large, well-provisioned garrisons
surrendered to Napoleon without firing a shot? Why did German
monarchs have no pride? William II of Prussia had emerged as a cowardly
nonentity; the King of Saxony was a self-abasing French puppet whose
palace at Dresden Napoleon used as a hotel; while the Emperor Francis
was a pathetic figure who spent his time making toffee or endlessly
stamping blank sheets of parchment with specimens from his huge
collection of seals.
Something of this German risorgimento spirit was also evident in
Austria. Despite a precarious financial base and Emperor Francis's dislike
of anything that smacked of 'Jacobinism', Archduke Charles, appointed
supreme Commander-in-Chief with powers superior to those of the Aulic
Council, managed to reform the Army. Charles's methods involved
wholesale imitation of Napoleon's: the army corps system, employment of
sharpshooters and skirmishers, rigorous drilling, improved artillery and
marcin
(Marcin)
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