The primacy of foreign policy and the ‘imperious dictates of geography’: Prussia confronts the French threat, October 1804 to June 1806

Throughout the period 1804 to 1806 Prussian statesmen remained preoccupied by foreign affairs; domestic matters continued to be entirely subordinate. Indeed, in times of extreme external peril Prussian foreign policy was formulated without consulting, and without reference to, sectional interests. Reinhard Koselleck's contention that the monarch could not undertake anything against the will of the bureaucracy, is thus in need of revision. As the events of the Hanoverian crisis demonstrated, the protests of powerful interest groups such as the Baltic grain merchants and the bureaucracy could be overridden when the higher interests of the state were at stake. It may be, to borrow the vulgar Marxist characterisation of Fritz Eisner, that Prussian bureaucrats were motivated by the ‘patriotism of the grain trade’, or were merely serving the ‘economic interests’ of the nobility when they demanded a rapprochement with Britain. But the patriotic instincts of Prussian statesmen – estate-owners almost to a man – told them that commercial ruin was a small price to pay when faced with immediate extinction at the hands of France. Moreover, despite looming economic disaster, the grain-producing East Elbian agrarian elites do not seem to have made any attempt to reverse the policy of confrontation with Britain; if they did, it was entirely unsuccessful.

The extreme reluctance of the Junkers to challenge the state over foreign policy was highlighted by the fate of von der Marwitz's philippic against the policy of appeasement towards France.