Prussian uniforms, 1786. The war of the Bavarian Succession (1778-9) had revealed serious weaknesses in the Prussian army, despite its high reputation, including the absence of sufficient supplies, demoralized infantry and undisciplined cavalry.
Battle of Valmy, 20 September 1792. Far from being the triumph of a new military order, this was not a full-scale battle. The outnumbered Prussians were checked by the strength of the French position, especially the artillery, which came from the ancien regime army, and retreated.
Civil conflict. The deterioration in relations between William V of Orange and the Patriots led to civil conflict in the United Provinces (modern Netherlands) and, eventually, in 1787, to a successful invasion on behalf of William V by a Prussian army. Patriot forces proved far less effective than their American counterparts.
The Seven Years War established the reputation of the Prussian army and is generally seen as marking the apogee of ancien regime warfare. Thereafter, foreign observers flocked to attend Prussian military reviews and the annual manoeuvres in Silesia. Louis-Alexandre Berthier, later Napoleon’s chief of staff and minister of war, was much impressed by those he attended in 1783, three years before Frederick’s death.
The Prussians demonstrated their continued effectiveness in 1787. A rapidly advancing Prussian army overran the United Provinces in order to establish the authority of the Prince of Orange in the Dutch crisis of that year. The Prussians were helped by the poor quality of the resistance and by the failure of the French to come to the assistance of their Dutch allies. As was customary in western Europe, the absence of an effective defence was crucial to a rapid successful advance. General James Grant noted how much the Prussians under Karl, Duke of Brunswick (1735-1806), a protégé of Frederick the Great, had benefited from the confusion and weakness of the Dutch:
…as he had no train of artillery with him to force the strong passes upon the dikes, and the several very strong fortified places, which they were so good as to abandon without making the smallest resistance.
Brunswick‘s success left the Prussian reputation high. In 1790 Joseph Ewart, the British envoy in Berlin, wrote:
I have always considered this country as a great machine, composed of above 200,000 men of the best troops in the world, a treasure that would enable it to carryon four or five campaigns … a more useful ally than any other power.
Yet this army was to succumb to that of Napoleonic France. Brunswick’s advance on Paris in 1792 was checked by larger revolutionary forces at Valmy, and the Prussians were defeated at Jena in 1806, only twenty years after Frederick’s death. This appears to mark the failure of the ancien regime system. There had been mounting criticism of Prussian linear tactics during Frederick’s last years. In 1785 Cornwallis had been critical of the lack of flexibility in Prussian tactics and in 1790 a French diplomat wrote of an obvious decline in the Prussian army since Frederick’s death.
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The War of the Bavarian Succession was a war that occurred in 1778 and 1779. The fight is known as the Potato War (Kartoffelkrieg) because of the extended time the Prussian and Austrian troops spent in manoeuvres in Bohemia to obtain or deny food-supplies to the enemy.
When Elector Maximilian III of the junior branch of the Wittelsbach died in 1777, the Sulzbach line stood as heir to the Duchy of Bavaria. The Elector Palatine Charles IV Theodore was the actual heir who inherited the throne and he proceeded to cede Lower Bavaria to Austria by secret treaty with Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, in exchange for which he was to receive the Austrian Netherlands.
Maximilian’s consort Maria Anna Sophia of Saxony started negotiations with Prussia to secure Bavaria’s independence and the succession of the Wittelsbach branch Palatinate Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld in Bavaria after Charles Theodore’s death. Count Karl-Wilhelm Finck von Finckenstein, Prussian First Minister under Frederick the Great believed that Austria’s acquisitions in Bavaria would rebalance the gain of Silesia to Prussia three decades earlier, thus reestablishing Austria’s hegemony in German-speaking lands and undermining Prussia’s own position. He therefore constructed an alliance with Saxony and both countries declared war on Austria, ostensibly to defend the rights of Charles II August, Duke of Zweibrücken, Charles Theodore’s heir.
The invasion of Bohemia was largely bloodless and ended in the Congress of Teschen (1779), mediated by Russia and France. According to the peace settlement, Maria Theresa of Austria, much to her son’s and co-ruler’s displeasure, gave all but the Innviertel back to Bavaria. Saxony received financial reward for their role in the intervention. It is notable as Frederick the Great’s last war. When Emperor Joseph II tried the scheme again in 1784, Frederick created the Fürstenbund, allowing himself to be seen as a defender of German liberties.
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The first garrison began construction in Berlin in 1764. While Frederick William I wanted to have a mostly native-born army, Frederick II wanted to have a mostly foreign-born army, preferring to have native Prussians be taxpayers and producers. The Prussian army consisted of 187,000 soldiers in 1776, 90,000 of whom were Prussian subjects in central and eastern Prussia. The remainder were foreign (both German and non-German) volunteers or conscripts. Frederick established the Garde du Corps as the royal guard. Many troops were disloyal, such as mercenaries or those acquired through impressment, while troops recruited from the canton system displayed strong regional, and nascent national, pride. During the Seven Years’ War, the elite regiments of the army were almost entirely composed of native Prussians.
By the end of Frederick’s reign, the army had become an integral part of Prussian society and numbered 193,000 soldiers.[1] The social classes were all expected to serve the state and its army — the nobility led the army, the middle class supplied the army, and the peasants composed the army. Minister Friedrich von Schrötter remarked that, “Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country”.
Frederick the Great’s successor, his nephew Frederick William II (1786–97), relaxed conditions in Prussia and had little interest in war. He delegated responsibility to the aged Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, [2] and the army began to degrade in quality. Led by veterans of the Silesian Wars, the Prussian Army was ill-equipped to deal with Revolutionary France. The officers retained the same training, tactics, and weaponry used by Frederick the Great some forty years earlier. In comparison, the revolutionary army of France, especially under Napoleon Bonaparte, was developing new methods of organization, supply, mobility, and command.
Prussia withdrew from the First Coalition in the Peace of Basel (1795), ceding the Rhenish territories to France. Upon Frederick William II’s death in 1797, the state was bankrupt and the army outdated. He was succeeded by his son, Frederick William III (1797–1840), who involved Prussia in the disastrous Fourth Coalition. The Prussian Army was decisively defeated in the battles of Saalfeld, Jena, and Auerstedt in 1806. The Prussians’ famed discipline collapsed and led to widescale surrendering among infantry, cavalry, and garrisons. While some Prussian commanders acquitted themselves well, such as L’Estocq at Eylau, Gneisenau at Kolberg, and Blücher at Lübeck, they were not enough to reverse Jena-Auerstedt. Prussia submitted to major territorial losses, a standing army of only 42,000 men, and an alliance with France in the Treaty of Tilsit (1807).
[1] A final note on Frederick the Great’s ability to supply his army. Not only did Frederick always manage to find the money for the purchase of the supplies he needed for his army during the Seven Years War but that during the next war with Austria during the 1770′s [the 'Potato War' with Austria in 1778-9 over the Bavarian succession] he was still feeding his armies with grain stored in the Magdeburg magazines during the Seven Years War!
[2] The Duke of Brunswick had served in the Seven Years’ War and was made a Prussian general in 1773. After he succeeded to his title in 1780, he was made field marshal in 1787, and commanded the Prussian army that rapidly and successfully invaded the United Provinces (The Dutch Republic) and restored the authority of the House of Orange. He was less successful against the highly motivated citizen’s army that met him at Valmy. Having secured Longwy and Verdun without serious resistance, he unexpectedly found himself heavily outnumbered at Valmy, turned back with a mere skirmish, and evacuated France. When he counterattacked the Revolutionary French who had invaded Germany, in 1793, he recaptured Mainz after a long siege, but resigned in 1794 in protest at interference by Frederick William II of Prussia.
He returned to command the Prussian army in 1806 during the War of the Fourth Coalition but was routed by Napoleon’s Marshal Davout at Battle of Jena-Auerstedt and died of the wounds he received.
