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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 Geography and politics: Prussia and her neighbours in 1792
- Map 2 Geography and politics: Prussia and her neighbours in 1795
- Map 3 Geography and politics: Prussia and her neighbours in 1803
- 1 Introduction
- Part I The structures
- Part II The events
- Part III The responses
- 8 Facing Napoleonic France: Prussian responses to the French threat, 1804–1806
- 9 The search for decision: Prussian reform attempts immediately before Jena
- 10 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - The search for decision: Prussian reform attempts immediately before Jena
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 Geography and politics: Prussia and her neighbours in 1792
- Map 2 Geography and politics: Prussia and her neighbours in 1795
- Map 3 Geography and politics: Prussia and her neighbours in 1803
- 1 Introduction
- Part I The structures
- Part II The events
- Part III The responses
- 8 Facing Napoleonic France: Prussian responses to the French threat, 1804–1806
- 9 The search for decision: Prussian reform attempts immediately before Jena
- 10 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The more power is concentrated in one place and in the hands of one person, the more the question of access to that place and that individual becomes the most important political, organisational and constitutional problem. The struggle for access to the absolute monarch, for the right to brief and advise him, for the right of direct access and suchlike is the real object of the constitutional history of absolutism.
Carl SchmittBy the spring and early summer of 1806 the magnitude of the French threat to Prussia had become clear for all to see. The resulting debate about policy and personalities has been examined at length in the previous chapters. However, the Prussian response to the mounting French threat did not exhaust itself in those controversies. It was articulated at a level other than that of international relations, namely the related, though nonetheless discrete, area of the reform of the state and its highest institutions. This chapter will prove that the Reform debate and its associated politics form part of a continuous narrative of the Prussian response to Napoleon and follow naturally from the methodology employed to explain this response throughout the book. The crisis in Prussia's foreign political situation and her system of government which resulted from the British war and the preceding humiliations at the hands of France triggered a reform process which, though it did not come to fruition until after the catastrophe of Jena/Auerstädt, should more properly be considered in the context of the crises and political enmities of the early part of the year. What follows is thus a natural extension of the preceding chapters.
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- Information
- The Impact of NapoleonPrussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806, pp. 304 - 337Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997