Citizen Emperor by Philip Dwyer

Author:Philip Dwyer
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

The king’s appeal met with a limited popular response: 1,400 men joined the Hanseatic Legion as infantry and another 200 as cavalry in the first days of liberation, often supplying their own equipment, although arms were also eventually supplied by Britain. The numbers increased in the following weeks, so that by April 1813 over 3,600 men had enlisted. Moreover, in what appears to be a German variant of the French National Guard, more than 6,000 men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five joined the Citizens’ Militia (Bürgergarde), equipped by a re-established Senate in Hamburg. It has to be said, however, that even if the Citizens’ Militia represented a break in Hamburg’s political culture, it does not seem to have been taken very seriously by the people of Hamburg; few followed training with the dedication that was expected of them.51 Poorly led, badly trained and badly equipped, they would be no match for regular soldiers once the French returned.

Similar scenes were played out in Berlin, although an appeal to patriotic sentiment was probably unnecessary.52 Prussian conscription was able to tap into proportionately higher numbers of troops than any other great power – 6 per cent of the population was under arms.53 (In comparison, the French were conscripting in 1813 about 2.1 per cent of the population, and that was the highest it ever reached for the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, about the same percentage of men mobilized during the wars of Louis XIV.) The Landwehr units on the other hand were poorly trained and poorly equipped, often lacking in the rudiments of uniforms, shoes and weapons. About 30,000 men volunteered to serve against France, representing about 10 per cent of the overall number of Prussian effectives.54 Compared to the French levée en masse in 1792, this was not a particularly impressive turnout and says a great deal about the structure of Prussian-German society. As for the Free Corps (Freikorps) units commanded by Baron Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm von Lützow, they were authorized immediately after the declaration of war by Frederick William in an attempt to recruit young men outside Prussia. By the middle of 1813, they had managed to attract only 3,891, almost half of whom were Prussian.55

The sentiments expressed by this small but highly articulate group of men came to define latterday German patriotism. The poet Theodor Körner, for example, whose death in August 1813 and whose writings came to symbolize the patriotism of German middle-class youth, spoke about the ‘self-willed heroism of a natural elite, whose sacrifice would inspire God to save the nation’.56 Certainly, ‘patriotism’, defined as a love of one’s (sometimes adopted) country, was beginning to take hold among people in central Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it needs to be remembered that the vast majority of troops fighting in the so-called Wars of Liberation were conscripts, among whom few such sentiments could be found. Patriotism as it later came to be defined by nineteenth-century German historians was not to play a decisive role in the coming wars, even if it was present in an incipient form among some of the volunteers.

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