Heinrich Friedrich Karl Reichsfreiherr vom und zum Stein (25 October 1757 – 29 June 1831), commonly known as Baron vom Stein

 

Stein was a Prussian statesman who introduced the Prussian reforms, which paved the way for the unification of Germany. He promoted the abolition of serfdom, with indemnification to territorial lords; subjection of the nobles to manorial imposts; and the establishment of a modern municipal system.

 

Stein was from an old Franconian family. He was born on the family estate near Nassau, studied at Göttingen, and entered the civil service. Prussian conservatism hampered him in his efforts to bring about changes. In 1807, he was removed from office by the King for refusing to accept the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs but was recalled after the Peace of Tilsit.

After it became known that he had written a letter in which he criticized Napoleon, Stein was obliged to resign, which he did on 24 November 1808 and retired to the Austrian Empire, from which he was summoned to the Russian Empire by Tsar Alexander I in 1812. After the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, Stein became head of the council for the administration of the reconquered German countries.

 

The Prussian Reform Movement was a series of constitutional, administrative, social and economic reforms early in the nineteenth-century Kingdom of Prussia. They are sometimes known as the Stein-Hardenberg Reforms, for Karl Freiherr vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg, their main initiators. Before the Second World War, German historians, such as Heinrich von Treitschke, saw the reforms as the first steps towards the unification of Germany and the foundation of the German Empire.

 

The reforms were a reaction to the defeat of the Prussians by Napoleon I at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, leading to the second Treaty of Tilsit, in which Prussia lost about half its territory and was forced to make massive tribute payments to France. To make those payments, it needed to rationalize its administration. Prussia's defeat and subjection also demonstrated the weaknesses of its absolute monarchy model of statehood and excluded it from the great powers of Europe.

To become a great power again, it initiated reforms from 1807 onwards, based on Enlightenment ideas and in line with reforms in other European nations. They led to the reorganization of Prussia's government and administration and changes in its agricultural trade regulations, including the abolition of serfdom and allowing peasants to become landowners. In industry, the reforms aimed to encourage competition by suppressing the monopoly of guilds. The administration was decentralised and the nobility's power reduced. There were also parallel military reforms led by Gerhard von Scharnhorst, August Neidhardt von Gneisenau and Hermann von Boyen and educational reforms headed by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Gneisenau made it clear that all these reforms were part of a single programme when he stated that Prussia had to put its foundations in "the three-faced primacy of arms, knowledge and the constitution".

 

It is harder to ascertain when the reforms ended – in the fields of the constitution and internal politics in particular, the year 1819 marked a turning point, with Restoration tendencies gaining the upper hand over constitutional ones. Though the reforms undoubtedly modernised Prussia, their successes were mixed, with results that were against the reformers' original wishes. The agricultural reforms freed some peasants, but the liberalisation of landholding condemned many of them to poverty. The nobility saw its privileges reduced but its overall position reinforced. Before 1806, several observers and high-level civil servants such as Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg underlined the fact that the Prussia state needed restructuring. As Minister of Finances and the Economy, Stein put some reforms in place, such as standardising the price of salt (then a state monopoly) and partially abolishing the export-import taxes between the kingdom's territories. In April 1806, he published Darstellung der fehlerhaften Organisation des Kabinetts und der Notwendigkeit der Bildung einer Ministerialkonferenz (literally Exposé on the imperfect organisation of the cabinet and on the necessity of forming a ministerial conference). 

 

The German campaign of 1813: (German: Befreiungskriege, lit. 'Wars of Liberation') Members of the Sixth Coalition, including the German states of Austria and Prussia, plus Russia and Sweden, fought a series of battles in Germany against the French Emperor Napoleon, his marshals, and the armies of the Confederation of the Rhine - an alliance of most of the other German states - which ended the domination of the First French Empire.

After the devastating defeat of Napoleon's Grande Armée in the Russian campaign of 1812, Johann Yorck – the general in command of the Grande Armée's German auxiliaries (Hilfskorps) – declared a ceasefire with the Russians on 30 December 1812 via the Convention of Tauroggen. This was the decisive factor in the outbreak of the German campaign the following year.

 

The spring campaign between France and the Sixth Coalition ended inconclusively with a summer truce (Truce of Pläswitz). Via the Trachenberg Plan, developed during a period of ceasefire in the summer of 1813, the ministers of Prussia, Russia, and Sweden agreed to pursue a single allied strategy against Napoleon. Following the end of the ceasefire, Austria eventually sided with the coalition, thwarting Napoleon's hopes of reaching separate agreements with Austria and Russia. The coalition now had a clear numerical superiority, which they eventually brought to bear on Napoleon's main forces, despite earlier setbacks such as the Battle of Dresden. The high point of allied strategy was the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, which ended in a decisive defeat for Napoleon. The Confederation of the Rhine was dissolved following the battle with many of its former member states joining the coalition, breaking Napoleon's hold over Germany.

 

After a delay in which a new strategy was agreed upon, in early 1814 the coalition invaded France, coinciding with the march of Duke of Wellington's British army northward from Spain into southern France. Napoleon was forced to abdicate and Louis XVIII assumed the French throne. The war came to a formal end with the Treaty of Paris in May 1814.

 

Since 1806 writers and intellectuals such as Johann Philipp Palm, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Ernst Moritz Arndt, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, and Theodor Körner had been criticising the French occupation of much of Germany. They advocated limitations to the dynastic princes of Germany and a joint effort by all Germans, including Prussians and Austrians, to eject the French. From 1810, Arndt and Jahn repeatedly asked high-ranking figures in Prussian society to prepare such an uprising. Jahn himself organised the German League and made a major contribution to the founding of the Lützow Free Corps. These forerunners took part in the outbreak of hostilities in Germany, both by serving in the armed forces and by backing the coalition through their writings.

Even before the German campaign, there had been uprisings against French troops occupying Germany – these had broken out from 1806 onwards in Hesse and in 1809 during the Tyrolean Rebellion. These uprisings intensified in the same year under Wilhelm von Dörnberg, the initiator and commander-in-chief of the Hessian uprising, and Major Ferdinand von Schill

Following the near-destruction of Napoleon's Grande Armée in Russia in 1812, Johann Yorck – the general in command of the Grande Armée's German auxiliaries (Hilfskorps) from the Confederation of the Rhine – declared a ceasefire with the Russians on 30 December 1812 via the Convention of Tauroggen. This was the decisive factor in the outbreak of the German campaign the following year.

 

On 17 March 1813 – the day Emperor Alexander I of Russia arrived in the Hoflager of King Frederick William III – Prussia declared war on France. On 20 March 1813, the Schlesische privilegierte Zeitung newspaper published Frederick's speech entitled An Mein Volk, delivered on 17 March and calling for a war of liberation. In addition to newly formed Prussian units such as the Landwehr and Landsturm, the initial fighting was undertaken by volunteers such as German volunteer troops, Jäger units, Free Corps (such as the Lützow Free Corps), and troops from Russia, (from the summer of 1813 onwards) Sweden under Crown Prince Charles John (the former French marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte), and Austria under Field Marshal Karl von Schwarzenberg. Already busy with maintaining naval supremacy and fighting in the Peninsular War, Great Britain did not take any direct part in the German campaign, though it sent subsidies to support it.

 

The Convention of Tauroggen became the starting-point of Prussia's regeneration. As the news of the destruction of the Grande Armée spread, and the appearance of countless stragglers convinced the Prussian people of the reality of the disaster, the spirit generated by years of French domination burst out. For the moment the king and his ministers were placed in a position of the greatest anxiety, for they knew the resources of France and the boundless versatility of their arch-enemy far too well to imagine that the end of their sufferings was yet in sight. To disavow the acts and desires of the army and of the secret societies for defence with which all north Germany was honeycombed would be to imperil the very existence of the monarchy, whilst an attack on the remnants of the Grande Armée meant the certainty of a terrible retribution from the new French armies now rapidly forming on the Rhine.

But the Russians and the soldiers were resolved to continue the campaign, and working in collusion they put pressure on the not unwilling representatives of the civil power to facilitate the supply and equipment of such troops as were still in the field; they could not refuse food and shelter to their starving countrymen or their loyal allies, and thus by degrees the French garrisons scattered about the country either found themselves surrounded or were compelled to retire to avoid that fate. Thus it happened that Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, the viceroy of Italy, felt compelled to retreat from the positions that Napoleon ordered him to hold at al costs to his advanced position at Posen, where about 14,000 men had gradually rallied around him, and to withdraw step by step to Magdeburg, where he met reinforcements and commanded the whole course of the lower Elbe.

 

Meanwhile in Paris, Napoleon had been raising and organizing a new army for the reconquest of Prussia. Thanks to his having compelled his allies to fight his battles for him, he had not as yet drawn very heavily on the fighting resources of France, the actual percentage of men taken by the conscriptions during the years since 1806 being actually lower than that in force in continental armies of today. He had also created in 1811–1812 a new National Guard, organized in cohorts to distinguish it from the regular army, and for home defense only, and these by a skillful appeal to their patriotism and judicious pressure applied through the prefects, became a useful reservoir of half-trained men for new battalions of the active army. Levies were also made with rigorous severity in the states of the Rhine Confederation, and even Italy was called on for fresh sacrifices. In this manner by the end of March, 200,000 men were moving towards the Elbe,[d] and in the first fortnight of April, they were duly concentrated in the angle formed by the Elbe and Saale, threatening on the one hand Berlin and on the other, Dresden and the east.

The coalition, aware of the gradual strengthening of their enemy's forces but themselves as yet unable to put more than 200,000 in the field, had left a small corps of observation opposite Magdeburg and along the Elbe to give timely notice of an advance towards Berlin; and with the bulk of their forces having taken up position near Dresden, whence they had determined to march down the course of the Elbe and roll up the French from right to left. Both armies were very indifferently supplied with information, as both were without any reliable regular cavalry capable of piercing the screen of outposts with which each endeavored to conceal his disposition, and Napoleon, operating in mostly unfriendly territory, suffered more in this respect than his adversaries.

 

On 25 April, Napoleon reached Erfurt and assumed command. That same day, his troops stood in the following positions. Eugène, with Marshal Jacques MacDonald's and Generals Jacques Lauriston's and Jean Reynier's corps on the lower Saale, Marshal Michel Ney in front of Weimar, holding the defile of Kösen; the Imperial Guard at Erfurt, Marshal Auguste de Marmont at Gotha, General Henri Bertrand at Saalfeld, and Marshal Nicolas Oudinot at Coburg, and during the next few days the whole were set in motion towards Merseburg and Leipzig, in the now stereotyped Napoleonic order, a strong advanced guard of all arms leading, the remainder—about two-thirds of the whole—following as "masse de manoeuvre", this time, owing to the cover afforded by the Elbe on the left, to the right rear of the advanced guard.

 

Meanwhile, the Prussians and Russians had concentrated all available men and were moving in an almost parallel line, but somewhat to the south of the direction taken by the French. On 1 May, Napoleon and the advance guard entered Lützen. Russian General Peter Wittgenstein, who now commanded the Coalition allies in place of Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, hearing of his approach, had decided to attack the French advance guard, which he mistakenly believed to be their whole force, on its right flank, and during the morning had drawn together the bulk of his forces on his right in the vicinity of Gross-Görschen and Kaya.

 

The coalition, aware of the gradual strengthening of their enemy's forces but themselves as yet unable to put more than 200,000 in the field, had left a small corps of observation opposite Magdeburg and along the Elbe to give timely notice of an advance towards Berlin; and with the bulk of their forces having taken up position near Dresden, whence they had determined to march down the course of the Elbe and roll up the French from right to left. Both armies were very indifferently supplied with information, as both were without any reliable regular cavalry capable of piercing the screen of outposts with which each endeavored to conceal his disposition, and Napoleon, operating in mostly unfriendly territory, suffered more in this respect than his adversaries.

 

The campaign ended the French period (Franzosenzeit) in Germany and fostered a new sense of German unity and nationalism. It also marked the exit of Sweden as a player in German affairs after 175 years, as Sweden ceded Swedish Pomerania to Prussia for its recognition of the Treaty of Kiel (including the Union of Sweden and Norway) and £500,000. The German Confederation, formed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, was a precursor to the modern German nation state, which was, however, only realized more than half a century later under Prussian leadership, with the exclusion of Austria, including Germans in the Sudetanlands of Bohemia. The popular image of the campaign in Germany was shaped by the cultural memory of its veterans, especially the many students who volunteered to fight in the Lützow Free Corps and other units who later rose to high positions in the military and political spheres. A new boom in remembrance of the war occurred in 1913, on the centenary of its outbreak.