Four or five kilometres south-east of Leipzig lies a war memorial: the Monument to the Battle of the Nations. The far more efficient German can do in one word what English does in seven: the Völkerschlachtdenkmal. It is a massive construction in rust-red granite, 91 metres tall, flanked at the top by gigantic, primeval warrior figures. If you arrive through the Wilhelm-Külz-Park, say a day in mid-October, the autumn foliage of the trees along the avenue frames the monument in red, yellow and green. There is an uncanny symmetry to the scene, like a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the artist who lived and worked here in Saxony for the last four decades of his life. It was here, in 1814, that he painted the work known as The Chasseur in the Forest. In it, a French soldier (a dragoon, rather than a chasseur) stares into the darkness of a deep, Teutonic wood; lost, abandoned, forlorn. “In the foreground a raven sings his death song.”

The monument commemorates the 1813 Battle of Leipzig; the largest ever fought on European soil, and the event that effectively ended the Napoleonic Wars. But the true protagonist among the victors was not the Kingdom of Saxony, who started out allied to France and only defected to the allies once hostilities were underway. Arguably, the nation that gained the most from Leipzig was the kingdom to the north: Prussia.

The history of Prussia is the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty. The family took its name from their ancestral castle in the south-western Swabian Alps. In 1417, Frederick Hohenzollern purchased the margravate of Brandenburg, a territory centred around the city of Berlin. The purchase was of greater political than territorial significance, since it made Frederick an elector of the Holy Roman Empire. By the eighteenth century, through a series of acquisitions and fortunate marriages, Brandenburg-Prussia had grown to become one of the great powers of the Empire. In 1701, Duke Frederick III formalised its status by declaring himself King Frederick I.

The pivotal moment in the kingdom’s history came with the War of the Austrian Succession. In 1740, Frederick II invaded the Austrian province of Silesia, today in south-western Poland. This challenge to the Habsburg dynasty, the rulers of the Empire and its dominant power, was a strikingly bald move by the upstart kingdom. To the shock of the other nations of Europe, Frederick not only succeeded in the invasion, but later held the conquered land against a coalition of Austria, France and Russia. For this, he justly earned the epithet “the Great”. Later, by the partitions of Poland, in 1772, 1793 and 1795, Prussia doubled her territory. The kingdom’s ascendancy appeared unstoppable.

But as with so many other things, this seemingly inexorable course of events was diverted by the Napoleonic Wars. By 1806, Napoleon had defeated Austria at the Battle of Austerlitz, and was encroaching on Prussian territory. Unprepared and without the support of any great power, Frederick William III made the rash decision to declare war on France. At the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, the Prussian army suffered a terrible defeat. Severely weakened, the kingdom persevered, but after further defeats had no choice but to accept Napoleon’s terms at the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807.

For Prussia, the consequences were disastrous. Territorially, the kingdom was stripped down to about half its former size: in the west to benefit France and her client states, in the east for the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw – Poland resurrected. Prussia was forced into an alliance with France, and had to pay ruinous indemnities. The kingdom was also made to reduce its own army significantly and, later on, to station a large number of French troops on its lands. This latter proved particularly demeaning, since the invading forces treated the local population with cruel brutality, and provisioned off the land to the point of causing starvation. In the words of the later hero of Leipzig and Waterloo, Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher: “My heart sobs over the disaster that has fallen on the state and upon my master.”[1]

What became clear to the Prussian elites was that the military glories of the age of Frederick the Great were long gone. Should the kingdom be able to prosper, even survive, into the future, radical reform was needed. The foremost theorist of military reform was Gerhard von Scharnhorst, a Hanoverian of humble birth. Under Scharnhorst’s leadership, the Prussian army was remade on the model of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. The strictly hierarchical chain of command was replaced by a general staff, where responsibility was divided between a number of officers. The army was organised into a corps system, allowing individual units to act independently with more flexibility and ease of movement. Perhaps most importantly, military leadership would no longer be the sole prerogative of the aristocratic Junker class but was opened up to meritocratic promotion.

Reforms were not limited to the military sphere; government and general society also went through profound changes. The executive was divided into ministries with clearly defined responsibilities. Under the leadership of Wilhelm von Humboldt (brother of the naturalist Alexander), university students were no longer simply to have knowledge drilled into them, but would themselves take part in independent research. By the October Edict of 1807, serfdom was abolished, and in 1812, steps were taken towards the emancipation of the Jews.[2]

The humiliation of the forced alliance with France disgusted many Prussians at the time, few more so than the young officer – and Scharnhorst’s protégé – Carl von Clausewitz. Appalled by his country’s subjugation, he offered his services to the Russians, and helped bring about Prussia’s realignment with that country, a necessary step on the way to Leipzig.

The son of an officer, Clausewitz was destined for the army at an early age. He had not yet turned thirteen when he first saw action, at the Siege of Mainz in 1793.[3] He never became a great commander, though, and his abilities were directed primarily towards warfare in the abstract. Intellectually curious by nature, he spent the idle time officers had so much of reading: philosophy, politics and – not least – military theory. Dissatisfied with the consensus at the time, he worked for years on his magnum opus that would be published, posthumously, as On War. It has been described as “…not simply the greatest but the only truly great book on war.”[4] What Clausewitz does here is to take Napoleon’s practice, to which he had been a close witness himself, and turn it into theory.

First and foremost, the horrendous magnitude and indeterminate duration of the Napoleonic wars came from the lack of distinction between military and political leadership, and war was eventually fought for its own sake. The objectives of war, according to Clausewitz, had to be clearly defined and determined by the nation’s political leadership. This is the background for his famous dictum: “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” Brutal as it may sound, Clausewitz’s goal was in fact to prevent the carnage seen over the preceding decades.

Secondly, Clausewitz rejected the governing consensus that battle should be avoided at all costs. This was all very well for the civilised, ritualistic affair that war had been in the eighteenth century, where smaller units moved cautiously across the land, and their dependence on supply lines limited their range of motion. In Napoleon’s new, total war, larger, more motivated armies roamed the countryside freely and requisitioned supplies as they went. In this situation, commanders should actively seek out confrontation when strategic advantage allowed it.[5]

Finally, previous theoreticians had treated war as a chess game where all the pieces were clearly laid out and followed strict, predictable rules. Reality was very different. In the fog of war, so many things were unpredictable: environmental factors of the territory, the enemy’s intentions and capacity, and – not least – the mental state of your own troops. A commander could do little more than factor in these variables to the best of his abilities, and act accordingly. Much has changed in the two centuries since Clausewitz wrote down his ideas: railways made troop movement more efficient, the machine gun did the same with the killing of men, while airplanes and rockets moved fighting into the air, and drew civilians into the front line. But this latter point remains as relevant today as it was then, and is the reason why Clausewitz is still taught in military academies around the globe.

When Napoleon returned to Germany in 1813, he confronted a profoundly changed Prussia from that which he had defeated in 1806. The different outcome, however, was due to a more complex set of circumstances. First of all, Prussia now found itself in a grand alliance including Russia, Austria and Sweden, counting a total of 365,000 men.[6] Secondly, Napoleon’s Grande Armée had been all but wiped out in the Russian campaign of 1812. Though he managed, with allies, to muster a force of 195,000 for Leipzig, this was a poorly trained and poorly equipped army. In spite of all this, the battle turned out to be a close-run thing, and it took four days, from 16 to 19 October, for a decision to be made. In the end it was the desertion of the Saxon forces that turned out to be decisive. Napoleon realised that he could not continue the fight, and ordered a retreat across the only bridge spanning the Elster River. The plan was to blow up the bridge behind the retreating forces, but the corporal entrusted with the task panicked and lit the fuse too early. Thousands died in the explosion and 30,000 were captured. The allies pursued Napoleon all the way to Paris and forced a capitulation on 31 March 1814.

The French Revolution, and the ensuing Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, affected every nation in Europe. The impact was twofold: positive and negative, or rather active and reactive. For many, particularly members of smaller ethnic group living under the dependence of foreign rulers, the revolutionary ideals – nationalism, constitutionalism, democracy – served as a call to active rebellion. Nationalist movements led to the independence, or semi-independence, of nations like Norway and Greece, and later to the unification of Italy and Germany. At the same time, there was also a reactive force at work, as the old regimes perceived the threat from these revolutionary movements. Particularly at risk were large, multi-ethnic empires like Austria, but also smaller states with significant ethnic minorities, like Prussia after its Polish acquisitions.

Efforts to suppress these movements could be brutal, and take the form of surveillance, imprisonment and physical violence. But at the same time, attempts were also made to address the concerns of the dissatisfied, through reform and liberalisation. Few understood the challenge presented by French revolutionary ideas better than the British political philosopher Edmund Burke. In Burke’s words: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”[7] But change can be painful, and often a shock is needed for its necessity to become clear. For Prussia, that shock came at Jena. Throughout Europe, this tug of war continued, between empire and nation, between conflict and conciliation. It spanned the length of the nineteenth century, through the revolutions of 1848, until the nation state came out victorious in the aftermath of World War I. Which brings us back to our monument.

On 18 October 1913, to the day 100 years after the battle, the princes of Germany were gathered at Leipzig for the inauguration of the Monument to the Battle of the Nations. At their head was the King of Prussia, now also the Emperor of a united Germany.[8] Commemorating the greatest battle in European history, the 100,000 people present could be forgiven for assuming that no greater one would ever be fought. And yet, within a year, the continent was thrown into a new war where single battles would see the same number of casualties as Leipzig had seen combatants. By the end of World War I, the Emperor had abdicated, and, after almost exactly 500 years, the Hohenzollerns left Brandenburg.

[1] Charles J. Esdaile, Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803-1815 (London ; New York: Allen Lane, 2007), 299.

[2] Christopher M. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 320–38.

[3] Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2007), 29.

[4] Bernard Brodie, ‘The Continuing Relevance of On War’, in On War (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1989), 53.

[5] Michael Howard, Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 15–16.

[6] David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 1120.

[7] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 106.

[8] Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Die Völkerschlacht bei Leipzig: Europas Kampf gegen Napoleon (München: Beck, 2013), 104–7.