The German wars of liberation 1807–1815: The restrained insurgency

Abstract

In the Age of Napoleon, ‘small wars’ and ‘revolutionary war’ were closely connected. There were, however, different strands of this phenomenon: speaking professionally, conservative officers condemned small wars as an irregular regression to previous less disciplined forms of warfare. The Prussian state continually tried to discipline and regulate spontaneous risings. Yet the irregular character of small wars offered the opportunities for a less complex way of fighting, thus enabling the arming of the ‘people’ to fight. Individual undertakings, such as Ferdinand von Schill's doomed campaign in 1809, were designed to spark off a general popular uprising. But they were cheered by many and supported by few. Meanwhile, Neidhardt von Gneisenau conceived guerrilla-style Landsturm home-defence forces, which were designed for an irregular people's war. These concepts were put into practice in the ‘war of freedom’ – or ‘war of liberation’ – in 1813. Eventually both the mobilisation and the tactics remained regular, however, despite the emphatic appeal to a national ‘people's war’.