Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume III.Scott, Walter
History
Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume III.
Scott, Walter
France -- History -- 1789-1815; Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821
While the French army made this uninterrupted progress, the new King of
Holland, Louis Buonaparte, with an army partly composed of Dutch and
partly of Frenchmen, possessed himself with equal ease of Westphalia,
great part of Hanover, Emden, and East Friesland.[243]
[Sidenote: Oct. 25.]
To complete the picture of general disorder which Prussia now exhibited,
it is only necessary to add, that the unfortunate King, whose personal
qualities deserved a better fate, had been obliged, after the battle, to
fly into East Prussia, where he finally sought refuge in the city of
Königsberg. L'Estocq, a faithful and able general, was still able to
assemble out of the wreck of the Prussian army a few thousand men, for
the protection of his sovereign. Buonaparte took possession of Berlin on
the 25th October, eleven days after the battle of Jena. The mode in
which he improved his good fortune, we reserve for future consideration.
[Sidenote: FALL OF PRUSSIA.]
The fall of Prussia was so sudden and so total, as to excite the general
astonishment of Europe. Its prince was compared to the rash and
inexperienced gambler, who risks his whole fortune on one desperate
cast, and rises from the table totally ruined. That power had, for three
quarters of a century, ranked among the most important of Europe; but
never had she exhibited such a formidable position as almost immediately
before her disaster, when, holding in her own hand the balance of
Europe, she might, before the day of Austerlitz, have inclined the scale
to which side she would. And now she lay at the feet of the antagonist
whom she had rashly and in ill time defied, not fallen merely, but
totally prostrate, without the means of making a single effort to arise.
It was remembered that Austria, when her armies were defeated, and her
capital taken, had still found resources in the courage of her subjects,
and that the insurrections of Hungary and Bohemia had assumed, even
after Buonaparte's most eminent successes, a character so formidable, as
to aid in procuring peace for the defeated Emperor on moderate terms.
Austria, therefore, was like a fortress repeatedly besieged, and as
often breached and damaged, but which continued to be tenable, though
diminished in strength, and deprived of important outworks. But Prussia
seemed like the same fortress swallowed up by an earthquake, which
leaves nothing either to inhabit or defend, and where the fearful agency
of the destroyer reduces the strongest bastions and bulwarks to crumbled
masses of ruins and rubbish.
The cause of this great distinction between two countries which have so
often contended against each other for political power, and for
influence in Germany, may be easily traced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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