Russia Against Napoleon

To do the king justice, he had good reason for nervousness and equivocation in January 1813. When he heard the news of Tauroggen the Russian armies were still hundreds of kilometres away in Poland and Lithuania. French garrisons on the contrary were scattered across Prussia, including a large one in Berlin. This dictated that Frederick William’s first public reaction must be to denounce the convention and to send messages to Napoleon pledging his continued loyalty. The king took advantage of Napoleon’s request to contribute more troops to the Grande Armée by levying extra recruits and expanding his army. On 22 January he himself, his family and the Guards regiments decamped from Potsdam and Berlin to the Silesian capital, Breslau. By so doing he achieved independence from the French and secured himself against kidnap. Since Breslau was right in the path of Russian armies advancing through Poland the king could put forward the half-plausible excuse that he was preparing Silesia’s defence.

Ideally Frederick William would have preferred an alliance with Austria to secure Germany as a neutral zone and stop the French and Russians fighting on his territory. A Prusso-Austrian alliance could also attempt to mediate a continental peace settlement which would restore to Vienna and Berlin much of the territory they had lost in 1805–9. With this goal in mind, the king’s trusted military adviser, Colonel Karl von dem Knesebeck, was sent to Vienna. He arrived on 12 January and stayed for no less than eighteen days.

At one level Knesebeck’s mission was a failure. The Austrians made it clear that they could not abandon the French alliance overnight and attempt immediately to impose mediation on the warring sides. The emperor’s honour and the completely unready state of their armies dictated a longer period of disengagement from the alliance with Paris. The basic point was that the Austrians had much more time for manoeuvre than the Prussians: Russian troops were not crossing the Austrian border, nor were Austrian generals threatening disobedience unless their sovereign changed his foreign policy.

On another level, however, Knesebeck’s mission was of great service. Both Metternich and Francis II promised categorically that they would reject Napoleon’s efforts to buy Austrian support against Prussia by offering her Silesia. They stressed that the two Germanic great powers must on the contrary both be restored to their pre-1805 dimensions in order to hold their own against France and Russia, thereby securing the independence of central Europe and the overall European balance of power. Far from opposing the Russo-Prussian alliance, the Austrians hinted that it seemed Prussia’s best option in the circumstances. Meanwhile, once ready, Vienna would put forward its own ideas for peace. Knesebeck concluded optimistically, and in a sense that went to the core of Russo-Prussian strategy in the spring and summer of 1813, ‘sooner or later Austria will go to war with France because the peace terms which she wants to achieve by mediation are unobtainable without war’.¹⁹

After reporting to Frederick William at Breslau, Knesebeck was sent on to Alexander’s headquarters. Before he would commit himself to Russia, the king needed reassurance on a number of points. Most basically, the Russians had to commit themselves to an advance which would liberate all of Prussian territory and allow the mobilization of its resources. Unless this was achieved it would be useless and suicidal for Frederick William to fight on Russia’s side since victory would be impossible and Prussia would become the inevitable target of Napoleon’s wrath. The king also sought confirmation that Russia would guarantee Prussian territory and her status as a great power.