Political Declaration

Napoleon needed Prussian troops for his coming invasion of Russia, and in February 1812 Prussia was pressed into a treaty, signed in Paris on the 24th, that pledged 20,000 of them. Major Carl von Clausewitz wrote this memorandum in the same weeks to explain why he and the officers who agreed with him could not serve that alliance. It argues that a people owes nothing higher than the defence of its dignity and freedom, and that submission is both dishonourable and unsafe. He spoke for the men who had wanted to fight and were being called fools, revolutionaries and intriguers, or members of the Tugendbund, a patriotic "League of Virtue" whose supposed leaders, he says, could hardly vouch that it existed. It falls into three confessions. The first is a credo: he renounces the hope of rescue by chance and the hope of calming a tyrant by disarming. The second argues from the record that alliance with France had protected no one, as Spain, Holland, Italy and northern Germany showed. The third is a working plan for a Landsturm, a general levy of every man from eighteen to sixty not already in the army. Modelled on Tyrol, the levy would be called out by the church bells and armed with muskets or, failing those, pikes and scythes; a worked example covers the country around Berlin. That spring Clausewitz resigned and entered Russian service. In April 1813 King Friedrich Wilhelm III decreed a Landsturm of all men from fifteen to sixty, and weakened the decree that July. The memorandum itself, which carries pencilled comments by his fellow army reformer August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, was held back out of regard for the government. The historian Georg Heinrich Pertz printed it in 1869, in the third volume of his life of Gneisenau.