Ansbach, Potsdam and after: the ascendancy of Hardenberg

The news that French troops under Marshal Bernadotte had flagrantly violated Prussian neutrality by marching through Ansbach and Bayreuth on their way south completely transformed the Central European political scene in early October 1805. Among the allied envoys resident in Berlin the mood was one of jubilation. Metternich reckoned that the affair had ‘thrown the king into the allied camp by hitting him at his most sensitive point’, that is by infringing his neutrality zone. His British colleague, Francis Jackson, believed that the Prussians, those ‘repentant sinners’, were on the verge of joining the allied cause. This did not happen. The tension which had been building up in the shadow of the threatened Russian violation of Prussia's neutrality, did not, as might reasonably have been expected, unload itself over the heads of the offending French. Instead, Prussia only inched very slowly towards accession to the Third Coalition and swung back to the old neutrality stance with alacrity after the disastrous allied defeat at Austerlitz. But the policy of mediation and neutrality resumed was in many ways a mask for Prussia's increasingly client status and had been purchased at the price of an inbuilt conflict with Great Britain which was to erupt with considerable violence in the spring of 1806.

Frederick William reacted to the news of the French action at Ansbach-Bayreuth with uncharacteristic fury and determination. It was, he said, ‘un événement qui peut changer la face des affaires’. Laforest reported that ‘Le Roi s'est laissé allé à un grand excès de colère’, while Duroc found the king so angry that he would not even listen to explanations.