Battle of Jena-Auerstedt
Prussia was destroyed as a military power in a single day in October 1806 in two battles fought fifteen kilometres apart. The army that took the field was the one Frederick the Great had commanded, still using his tactics and in several cases still commanded by his officers — the Duke of Brunswick was seventy-one and Möllendorf was eighty-two. Prussia had stayed out of the war of 1805, mobilised in 1806 after Napoleon offered Hanover to Britain behind its back, and issued an ultimatum without waiting for the Russians to arrive. The two battles are the whole story. At Jena, Napoleon attacked what he believed was the main Prussian army with some 96,000 men and beat about 38,000; at Auerstedt, Davout with a single corps of 27,000 met the actual main army of 63,000 under Brunswick, who was mortally wounded early, and beat it — the Prussians committing their reserves piecemeal and never using their numbers. Napoleon did not believe the report when it arrived. The pursuit is what turned defeat into collapse. Murat's cavalry rode the Prussians down for weeks, fortresses with intact garrisons surrendered to hussar patrols, and Berlin was occupied on 27 October. Napoleon visited Frederick's tomb at Potsdam and took the sword. The peace of Tilsit in 1807 halved the kingdom. The humiliation produced the reforms of Stein, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which abolished serfdom, opened the officer corps and built the army that came back in 1813. Hegel finished the Phenomenology of Spirit in Jena during the battle and wrote to a friend about seeing the emperor ride through the town, calling him the world-soul on horseback. Clausewitz was captured in the pursuit and spent two years as a prisoner thinking about why it had happened.
- Year: 1806 CE
- Category: Military
