A few days before the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III officially declared war against Napoleonic France in March 1813, the Silesian newspaper Schlesische Provinzialblätter wrote:

The article called on male readers to follow the king’s example and “ennoble and improve” both their public activities and their domestic lives according to his model. In this way they would prove themselves to be “worthy” sons of the “beloved father of the country [...] So that the German spirit and way of thinking may arise ever more amongst us, and we may increasingly reject the tattered, shallow and undomestic life with which foreigners have sought to inoculate us, and turn away in contempt.”

Like many other publications at the time of the Anti-Napoleonic Wars, this article propagated the image of the Prussian nation as a Volk family. This image organized the participation of men and women of different generations, familial statuses and regional and social backgrounds in the nation in a seemingly “natural” fashion, while simultaneously serving to contain demands for increased political participation in the state. At the head of the Prussian Volk family was the monarch as the “father,” and at his side the queen as the “mother of the people”; the two were bound to each other, as to their children and subjects, in love and solicitude. At the same time, in his role as supreme military commander, the father of the people also led the fraternal community of valorous male “citizens of the state.” He was even stylized as the “first citizen of his state.”